Release Process

This page is the maintainer runbook for publishing OxideBBS releases.

Use Versioning to choose the next version and Release Binaries to describe what sysops receive after publication.

Release Model

OxideBBS publishes GitHub releases from an existing v tag. The release workflow builds and smokes every artifact before the GitHub release is created.

The workflow is manual by design:

1. choose the next SemVer tag
2. run a dry run against the intended source ref
3. create and push the tag after approval
4. run the release workflow with dry_run=false
5. verify the hosted archives and checksums

Do not publish an empty GitHub release first and upload assets later. When GitHub release immutability is enabled, assets must be attached before the release is published. The workflow uses gh release create with the completed asset list so the GitHub CLI creates a draft, uploads assets, and publishes only after upload succeeds.

Dry Run

Run .github/workflows/release.yml from GitHub Actions with:

Input	Value
tag_name	the intended tag, such as vX.Y.Z
source_ref	main, a release branch, or a commit SHA
dry_run	true

The dry run builds the Linux, macOS, and Windows packages, verifies checksums, smokes each packaged binary, builds the VitePress documentation site, and builds/smokes the Docker image. It uploads the generated archives as workflow artifacts only. It does not create a GitHub release or publish a Docker image.

Publish

After the dry run passes and publication is approved, create the release tag and push it to GitHub:

git tag vX.Y.Z
git push origin refs/tags/vX.Y.Z

Then run .github/workflows/release.yml with:

Input	Value
tag_name	the tag that already exists on GitHub
source_ref	leave blank, or set to the same tag
dry_run	false

The publish run checks out the tag, rebuilds and smokes all release artifacts, pushes the smoke-tested Docker image to GitHub Container Registry, then creates the GitHub release with the artifacts and .sha256 files attached. The publish job uses --verify-tag, so it fails instead of creating a tag from the default branch.

Failure Recovery

If a dry run fails, fix the branch and run the dry run again.

If publication fails before the final Publish GitHub release step, no GitHub release has been created. If the Docker publish step already ran, inspect the GHCR tags before rerunning publication for the same tag.

If publication creates a release and then fails, treat the tag as spent when release immutability is enabled. Do not delete and reuse that release tag. Make a follow-up patch release instead.

Post-Publish Checks

After the workflow completes:

• confirm the GitHub release shows Linux, macOS, and Windows archives
• confirm every archive has a matching .sha256 file
• download at least one archive and repeat the checksum and --version smoke
• confirm ghcr.io/sphildreth/oxidebbs:<version> and ghcr.io/sphildreth/oxidebbs:v<version> are visible and pullable
• confirm the docs site still builds and deploys from the Pages workflow
• update design/TASKS.md if any approval-gated publication checks remain open