Need script to create releases

[crossan007]

Too many manual steps currently to create release

• Verify no remaining items open on milestone
• Identify accepted commit for tag
• Download zip package from demo site with correct commit hash
• Create GitHub Tag / Release
• Upload zip archive to GitHub Release
• Add release notes
• Calculate SHA1 hash of zip archive. Include in Release Notes footer
• Publish release
• Close Milestone
• Create new milestone with due date of the next calendar Monday
• Create new build/ branch
• Update Package.json version number
• Run grunt updateVersions
• run npm run gen-changelogs
• commit changes to new build branch
• create PR for new build branch to master
• Flow updates from master -> develop

Many of these steps can be automated, and make the release process less cumbersome

Resources:

• We have a way to interact with the GitHub API. Some custom code may need to be developed for creating releases.
• We have an ephemeral storage location for developer GitHub Personal Access Tokens (BuildConfig.json. This will never be committed to the repo, but may be used to facilitate the release creation process.
• We have a way to identify the commit hash at build time.
• Builds already occur in Jenkins. The script should leverage the sanitized build environment's result archive - not build locally for risk of including un-releasable files

Barriers / Questions:

• Should this script publish the release, or just save it as a draft for the devs to manually "publish"

[crossan007]

@DawoudIO do you have feedback on this?

I'm thinking I'll create an NPM script to handle as many steps as possible.

[DawoudIO]

Looks great

[DawoudIO]

this is started with new actions to automate as much as we can.

[DawoudIO]

.github/workflows/build-test-package.yml now helps with some of this, but the rest needs manual stuff still

[respencer]

@DawoudIO: How much of this is still an issue?

[DawoudIO]

I did a release on my iPad yesterday and we have a next version script