Releasing a new version¶

Prerequisites ¶

All PRs should be tagged with the appropriate milestone. Several of the releasing scripts depend on this being done.
You will need a GitHub API key: https://github.com/settings/tokens

If you are making a bugfix release onto an existing branch (e.g. 0.3.x) then you need to backport merged PRs from master onto this branch. To do this, check out the release branch (e.g. 0.3.x) and then run the backport_pr.py script from the tools directory.

First, use it to find the list of PRs that need to be backported (remember that you should have tagged all PRs with the appropriate milestone):

./tools/backport_pr.py 0.3.1

Second, use the script to backport the PRs one-by-one, in the order that they were merged into master, for example:

./tools/backport_pr.py 0.3.x 123

If a lot of code has changed between the release branch and master, the patch generated by the backport script may not apply. In this case, you will want to either (1) edit the patch to make it apply (e.g., by fixing line numbers) or (2) just apply the changes manually.

Update the changelog ¶

The changelog is located at CHANGELOG.md.

Get the list of PR¶

Ideally, the changelog should be updated as things are changed. In practice, this doesn’t always happen as people forget to include changes to the changelog in PRs. However, the changelog should be fully up-to-date at the time of a release. To ensure that it is up-to-date, filter PRs on GitHub by the current milestone and make sure to include all major changes. In addition, please include a full list of merged PRs, which can be found using jupyter_releaser workflow.

Note that if you are updating the changelog on a release branch (e.g. 0.3.x), then you will need to also make the relevant changes on master.

Get the list of contributors¶

To get the list of contributors, you can use the contributor_list.py script in the tools directory, for example:

./tools/contributer_list.py 0.3.0

This will print out the list of users who have submitted issues and/or PRs. This list should then be included in the changelog.

Bump the version number ¶

The version number is bumped using tbump : tbump <VERSION> --no-push

The version number should have been changed in the following files :

pyproject.toml
package.json
nbgrader/_version.py
src/assignment_list/index.ts
src/course_list/index.ts
src/validate_assignment/index.ts

Rebuild the documentation ¶

Regenerate all the documentation for this release by running :

python tasks.py docs

Make sure the linkcheck passes, and commit the results.

Make a PR ¶

At this point, make a pull request with the changes you have made so far. Make sure all the tests pass. After this point, you shouldn’t need to make any more changes to the source: the remaining steps all have to do with building and releasing packages and creating branches/tags on GitHub.

Clean all untracked files ¶

Make sure there are no old files lying around the repository. First, see what needs to be cleaned:

git clean -ndx

After verifying this doesn’t include anything important, clean them for real:

git clean -fdx

Build and release the pip package ¶

To build the pip package, run the release.py script in the tools directory:

./tools/release.py

This will do a few things, including converting the README file to rst (so it will display correctly on PyPI) and building the source distribution. Afterwards, you can upload the package to PyPI with:

pip install -U twine
python -m twine upload dist/*

Create a git tag and possibly branch ¶

If this is a new major release, create a new .x branch. For example, if this is the 0.3.0 release, create a branch called 0.3.x.

Additionally, regardless of whether this is a major release, create a tag for the release. Release tags should be prefixed with v, for example, v0.3.0.

Create a release on GitHub ¶

After pushing the tag (and branch, if necessary) to GitHub, create the actual release on GitHub. To do this, go to https://github.com/jupyter/nbgrader/releases and click the button for “Draft a new release”. Choose the tag you just created and set the title as “nbgrader <tag>”, where “<tag>” is the name of the tag (e.g. v0.3.0). Put in the release notes, which should be pretty much the same as what is in the changelog.

Build and release the conda packages ¶

The conda recipe has been moved to a separate repository (“feedstock”) and now publishes nbgrader to the conda-forge channel automatically via CI. The conda forge buildbot should detect once you’ve created a tag and will automatically create a PR for the new release within a short period of time (might be up to an hour). Wait for this PR to happen, and then follow the instructions in the nbgrader-feedstock.

Change to development version ¶

Bump the version again, this time to development. For example, if the release was 0.3.0, then the new version should be 0.4.0.dev.

Use tbump again : tbump 0.4.0.dev --no-push (change the version number with the correct one)

As a reminder, the files concerned are :

pyproject.toml
package.json
nbgrader/_version.py
src/assignment_list/index.ts
src/course_list/index.ts
src/validate_assignment/index.ts