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Releasing

This guide describes the release pipeline for our RPM components, from upstream GitHub repositories through to downstream distributions. The pipeline is largely automated and flows through three main stages: Upstream, Fedora, and CentOS Stream / RHEL.

Components​

The following components are managed by this pipeline. All are released to Fedora, while some are also released to CentOS Stream, RHEL, or both:

Upstream release​

Upstream releases are driven by the release-action GitHub Action. Most components (osbuild, osbuild-composer, image-builder) are released on a regular schedule every Wednesday, with different components on different weeks. Other components (cockpit-image-builder, koji-osbuild, koji-image-builder) are released ad-hoc — manually triggered when needed.

  1. Push a new release tag — The release-action creates and pushes a new vXX release tag to the upstream repository. If no new commits have been merged since the previous release, the action skips and no release is created.
  2. Create the release and bump the version — Once the tag is pushed, the release-action creates the GitHub release and bumps the version in the repository. This includes bumping the version in all relevant files — such as the SPEC file for components shipped as RPMs. The version bump prepares the repository for the next release and ensures that testing and development builds have a higher version than the most recent stable release.
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A release can also be triggered manually at any time by running the release-action workflow from the GitHub Actions UI in the respective component repository.

Fedora release​

Once a new upstream release is published, Packit takes over to push it into Fedora.

  1. Open a PR for fedora-all — Packit automatically opens a pull request with the new release against all active Fedora dist-git branches for each component.
  2. Trigger a Koji build — Once the PR is merged to dist-git, Packit triggers a Koji build for all Fedora branches.
  3. Submit a Bodhi update — After the Koji build finishes, Packit submits a Bodhi update targeting fedora-stable.

CentOS Stream / RHEL releases​

If you are a Red Hat employee, please continue reading about this in our internal release guide.

Key automation actors​

ActorRole
GitHub Actions (release-action)Creates upstream release tags and releases (scheduled or manually triggered)
PackitManages Fedora dist-git PRs, Koji builds, and Bodhi updates