This material is old. Refer to https://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/development/releasing.html for current release procedures.

This page documents the steps to releasing a stable version of Astropy

(below are just some random things to remember, feel free to reorder/expand/add)

• Update the version string setup.py for the appropriate release (e.g., "0.1") and commit to the git repo.

• Create a tag (signed or annotated, not lightweight) in the git repo with the appropriate version number ("v0.1")

• Create a new branch for bugfixes (e.g. "0.1.x")

• Update the version string to the next bugfix version (e.g., "0.1.1.dev"), and commit.

• Switch back to the master branch, update the version string to the next version's (e.g. '0.2.dev') and commit.

• checkout the tag for the release version ("v0.1"), and do all further operations with that checkout.

• Make a tar file

  • Using python setup.py sdist should ensure that no extraneous files are included

• Ensure that it compiles in an environment without Cython

  • This is done on with each revision by the ShiningPanda astropy-sdist test.

  • Does this require changes to the setup script?

• Upload tar file to GitHub

• Add/update package on PyPI (I think we should have the tar file hosted on GitHub so that we can keep track of download statistics). Here's an example of a package where the tar file is on GitHub: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/APLpy/0.9.8

• Ensure that website and front page of docs are updated to reflect the fact there is now a stable release

• Update Readthedocs so that it builds docs for the corresponding github tag, and set the default page to the new release.

• (For releases after 0.1) Move the documentation link for the previous version to the documentation archive page on the web site.

We shouldn't necessarily advertise on all these channels for very first release:

• astropy and astropy-dev mailing lists - (all releases)

• Twitter (@astropy) - (all releases)

• astrobetter - (all releases?)

• Facebook - (v0.2 and later?)

• Institutional python mailing lists (CfA, MPIA, etc.) - (v0.2 and later?)

• Conference talks - (major versions, possibly v0.2, then v1.0, v2.0, etc.)