Packaging and deployment

Packaging

This plugin is using the qgis-plugin-ci tool to perform packaging operations.
Under the hood, the package command is performing a git archive run based on CHANGELOG.md.

Install additional dependencies:

python -m pip install -U -r requirements/packaging.txt

Then use it:

# package a specific version
qgis-plugin-ci package 1.3.1
# package latest version
qgis-plugin-ci package latest

Release a version

Everything is done through the continuous deployment, sticking to a classic git workflow: 1 released version = 1 git tag.

Here comes the process for a tag X.y.z (which has to be SemVer compliant):

1. Add the new version to the CHANGELOG.md.You can write it manually or use the auto-generated release notes by Github:

   1. Go to project’s releases and click on Draft a new release

   2. In Choose a tag, enter the new tag

   3. Click on Generate release notes

   4. Copy/paste the generated text from ## What's changed until the line before **Full changelog**:... in the CHANGELOG.md replacing What's changed with the tag and the publication date.

2. Optionally change the version number in metadata.txt. It’s recommended to use the next version number with -DEV suffix (e.g. 1.4.0-DEV when X.y.z is 1.3.0 ) to avoid confusion during the development phase.

3. Apply a git tag with the relevant version: git tag -a X.y.z {git commit hash} -m "This version rocks!"

4. Push tag to main branch: git push origin X.y.z or git push --tags if you want to push all tags at once.

5. The CI/CD pipeline will be triggered and will create a new release on your Git repository and publish it to the official QGIS plugins repository (if you picked up the option).

If things go wrong (failed CI/CD pipeline, missed step…), here comes the fix process:

git tag -d old
git push origin :refs/tags/old
git push --tags

And try again!