release-process.md

Release Process

These procedures concern the release process for the Cypress binary and cypress npm module.

The @cypress/-namespaced NPM packages that live inside the /npm directory are automatically published to npm (with semantic-release) upon being merged into develop. You can read more about this in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Anyone can build the binary and npm package locally, but you can only deploy the Cypress application and publish the npm module cypress if you are a member of the cypress npm organization.

Publishing

Prerequisites

• Ensure you have the following permissions set up:

  • An AWS account with permission to access and write to the AWS S3, i.e. the Cypress CDN.
  • Permissions for your npm account to publish the cypress package.

• Set up an AWS SSO profile with the Team-CypressApp-Prod role. The release scripts assumes the name of your profile is prod. Make sure to open the "App Developer" expando for some necessary config values. Your AWS config file should end up looking like the following:

  [profile prod]
  sso_start_url = <start_url>
  sso_region = <region>
  sso_account_id = <account_id>
  sso_role_name = <role_name>
  region = <region>
  cli_pager = <pager>
  

• Set up the following environment variables:

  • For the release-automations step, you will need setup the following envs:

    • GitHub token - Found in 1Password.
    • The cypress-bot GitHub app credentials. Found in 1Password.

    GITHUB_TOKEN="..."
    GITHUB_APP_CYPRESS_INSTALLATION_ID=
    GITHUB_APP_ID=
    GITHUB_PRIVATE_KEY=
    

  • For purging the Cloudflare cache (needed for the prepare-release-artifacts script in step 6), you'll need CF_ZONEID and CF_TOKEN set. These can be found in 1Password.

    CF_ZONEID="..."
    CF_TOKEN="..."
    

• Ensure that you have the following repositories checked out locally and ready to contribute to:

  • cypress-realworld-app
  • cypress-documentation
  • cypress-docker-images
  • cypress-io/release-automations

If you don't have access to 1Password, ask a team member who has done a deploy.

Tip: Use as-a to manage environment variables for different situations.

Before Publishing a New Version

In order to publish a new version of the cypress package to the npm registry, CI must build and test it across multiple platforms and test projects. CI is set up to do the following on every commit to develop:

1. Build the npm package with the next target version baked in.
2. Build the Linux, Mac & Windows binaries on CircleCI.
3. Upload the binaries and the new npm package to the AWS S3 Bucket cdn.cypress.io under the "beta" folder.
4. Launch test projects using the newly-uploaded package & binary instead of installing from the npm registry.

Multiple test projects are launched for each target operating system and the results are reported back to GitHub using status checks so that you can see if a change has broken real-world usage of Cypress. You can see the progress of the test projects by opening the status checks on GitHub:

Steps to Publish a New Version

In the following instructions, "X.Y.Z" is used to denote the next version of Cypress being published.

Note: It is advisable to notify the team that the develop branch is locked down prior to beginning the release process

1. Install and test the pre-release version to make sure everything is working. See Install Pre-Release Version docs for more details.

   • Install the new version:
     • Globally: npm install -g <cypress.tgz path>
     • or in a project: npm i -D cypress@file:<cypress.tgz path>
   • Run a quick, manual smoke test:
     • cypress open
     • Go into a project, run a quick test, make sure things look right
   • Optionally, install the new version into an established project and run the tests there
     • cypress-realworld-app uses yarn and represents a typical consumer implementation.
   • Optionally, do more thorough tests, for example test the new version of Cypress against the Cypress Cloud repo.

2. Ensure all changes to the links manifest to on.cypress.io have been merged to develop and deployed.

3. Create a Release PR - Bump, submit, get approvals on, and merge a new PR. This PR should:

   • Bump the Cypress version in package.json
   • Bump the packages/example dependency if there is a new cypress-example-kitchensink version, and yarn to ensure the lockfile is up to date.
   • Follow the writing the Cypress Changelog release steps to update the cli/CHANGELOG.md.

4. Once the develop branch is passing in CI and you have confirmed the cypress-bot has commented on the commit with the pre-release versions for darwin-x64, darwin-arm64, linux-x64,linux-arm64, and win32-x64, publishing can proceed. Tips for getting a green build:

   • If the windows workflow is failing with timeout errors, you can retry from the last failed step.
   • Sometimes a test can get stuck in a failing state between attempts on the windows workflow. In these cases, kicking off a full run of the workflow can help get it into a passing state.
   • If the linux-x64 workflow fails due to a flaky test but percy finalizes the build, you must restart the workflow from the failed steps. Restarting the entire workflow after a finalized Percy build can cause Percy to fail the next attempt with a "Build has already been finalized" error, requiring pushing a new commit to start fresh.

5. Log into AWS SSO with aws sso login --profile <name_of_profile>. If you have setup your credentials under a different profile than prod, be sure to set the AWS_PROFILE environment variable to that profile name for the remaining steps. For example, if you are using production instead of prod, do export AWS_PROFILE=production.

6. Use the prepare-release-artifacts script (Mac/Linux only) to prepare the latest commit to a stable release. When you run this script, the following happens:

   • the binaries for <commit sha> are moved from beta to the desktop folder for <new target version> in S3
   • the Cloudflare cache for this version is purged
   • the pre-prod cypress.tgz NPM package is converted to a stable NPM package ready for release

   yarn prepare-release-artifacts --sha <commit sha> --version <new target version>

   You can pass --dry-run to see the commands this would run under the hood.

7. Validate you are logged in to npm with npm whoami. Otherwise log in with npm login. If you are not already a Cypress package maintainer, contact a team member who is to get you added.

8. Publish the generated npm package under the dev tag, using your personal npm account.

   npm publish /tmp/cypress-prod.tgz --tag dev

9. Double-check that the new version has been published under the dev tag using npm info cypress or available-versions. latest should still point to the previous version. Example output:

   dist-tags:
   dev: 3.4.0     latest: 3.3.2

   Note: It may take several minutes for npm info to reflect the latest version info.

10. Test [email protected] to make sure everything is working.

    • Install the new version: npm install -g [email protected]
    • Run a quick, manual smoke test:
      • cypress open
      • Go into a project, run a quick test, make sure things look right
    • Install the new version into an established project and run the tests there
      • cypress-realworld-app uses yarn and represents a typical consumer implementation.
    • Optionally, do more thorough tests, for example test the new version of Cypress against the Cypress Cloud repo.

11. Review the release-specific documentation and changelog PR in cypress-documentation. If there is not already a release-specific PR open, create one.

    • Copy the changelog content for this version from the release PR above into /docs/guides/references/changelog.mdx. Adjust any docs.cypress.io links to use host-relative paths.
    • Merge any release-specific documentation changes into the main release PR.
    • You can view the doc's branch deploy preview by clicking 'Details' on the PR's netlify-cypress-docs/deploy-preview GitHub status check.

12. Create a new docker image using the new cypress version in cypress-docker-images. Create a PR in which you update factory/.env to use the new cypress version. Ensure the docker image is reviewed and has passing tests before proceeding.

13. Make the new npm version the "latest" version by updating the dist-tag latest to point to the new version:

    npm dist-tag add [email protected]

14. Run binary-release to update the download server's manifest. This will also ensure the binary for the version is downloadable for each system.

    yarn binary-release --version X.Y.Z

15. Merge the documentation PR from step 11 and the new docker image PR created in step 12 to release the image.

16. If needed, deploy the updated cypress-example-kitchensink to example.cypress.io by following these instructions under "Deployment".

    • Build @packages/example with yarn workspace @packages/example build
    • Inspect the contents of ./packages/example/build before deploying, and ensure it looks correct
    • Run yarn workspace @packages/example deploy. This adds changes from cypress-example-kitchensink to a commit in the gh-pages branch, which will deploy to production with its own CI.
    • Check the deployed site at https://example.cypress.io to ensure the new changes deployed correctly.

17. Once the release is complete, create a Github tag off of the release commit which bumped the version:

    git checkout develop
    git pull origin develop
    git log --pretty=oneline
    # copy sha of the version bump commit
    git tag -a vX.Y.Z -m vX.Y.Z <sha>
    git push origin vX.Y.Z

18. Create a new GitHub release. Choose the tag you created previously and add contents to match previous releases.

19. Add a comment to each GH issue that has been resolved with the new published version. Download the releaseData.json artifact from the verify-release-readiness CircleCI job and run the following command inside of cypress-io/release-automations:

    npm run do:comment -- --release-data <path_to_releaseData.json>

20. Confirm there are no issues from the release with the label stage: pending release left.

21. Notify the team that develop is reopen, and post a message to the Releases Slack channel with a link to the changelog.

22. If utilizing the SKIP_RELEASE_CHANGELOG_VALIDATION_FOR_BRANCHES to override and skip changelog validation for this release, change its value as needed or delete it from CircleCI so that subsequent releases and PRs will go through changelog validation.

23. Check all cypress-test-* and cypress-example-* repositories, and if there is a branch named x.y.z for testing the features or fixes from the newly published version x.y.z, update that branch to refer to the newly published NPM version in package.json. Then, get the changes approved and merged into that project's main branch. For projects without a x.y.z branch, you can go to the Renovate dependency issue and check the box next to Update dependency cypress to X.Y.Z. It will automatically create a PR. Once it passes, you can merge it. Try updating at least the following projects:

    • cypress-example-todomvc
    • cypress-realworld-app
    • cypress-example-recipes

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