Repository Branches and Releases

This document describes how repositories are structured, including branch names, versioning, and automation. This applies to Plugin, Skill, Service, and Library repositories as defined here.

Default Branches

Repositories always contain dev and master branches.

Branch	Version	GitHub Release	Docker Image
dev	alpha	Pre-Release	dev
master	stable	Release	latest

New code is always PR'd into the dev branch as discrete changes. This Alpha Release Workflow describes the process of making changes to a repository. This allows the commit history of the dev branch to be used as a changelog for the project, with each change corresponding to a specific (alpha) version and a descriptive commit/PR.

When an alpha release is ready to be promoted to a stable release, a PR is created to merge changes from dev into master with a version number that generally follows semver or calver. This Stable Release Workflow describes the process of proposing and approving a stable release. A commit with the specific version number is created on the master branch, along with a GitHub Release so master always reflects the code from the latest release.

Versioning

Repositories always publish alpha/beta/pre-release versions and latest/stable/normal versions. The terms are often used interchangeably, but this document will follow SemVer's terminology of "pre-release" and "normal release".

Pull requests to dev and pre-releases map 1:1, so a merged PR to dev corresponds to a specific pre-release and vice versa. Pull requests to master map to normal releases in the same way.

A pre-release should always have a corresponding GitHub Pre-release and a normal release should have a GitHub Release.

For packages published to PyPI, the PyPI version will always match the repository version. Docker images that correspond to a specific version will always have a tag matching the repository version.

GitHub Releases

GitHub pre-release tags will always correspond to a specific "pre-release" and releases tags will always correspond to a specific "normal release".

An exception to this is the Neon OS repository which will list a normal release as a pre-release temporarily so the release may be manually validated before being made available to users tracking the stable update track.

Docker Containers

For repositories that publish Docker images, the dev image tag will always match the dev branch and the latest image will match the master branch. A stable tag will always be equivalent to latest, tracking the master branch. Images that correspond to any release (pre-release or normal release) will have an additional tag indicating the version.

A repository may optionally publish alpha tagged images that do not correspond to a specific version or tag. These are used for development and testing and should be considered unstable references. If alpha images are used in a repository, they should track a branch named alpha.

Kubernetes Deployments

In general, the alpha namespace will track alpha or dev images, beta namespace will track dev, and prod will track specific stable versions. prod will often specify versions equivalent to latest for each service, but it should specify version tags to prevent accidental updates when a new latest image is tagged and pods are re-created for some reason.