Publishing Guide

When publishing a new version of MetaMask, we follow this procedure:

Overview

The below diagram outlines our process for design, development, and release. Building MetaMask is a community affair, and many steps of the process invite participation from external contributors as indicated. All QA, code review, and release of new versions is done by members of the core MetaMask team.

Preparation

We try to ensure certain criteria are met before deploying:

Deploy early in the week, to give time for emergency responses to unforeseen bugs.
Deploy early in the day, for the same reason.
Make sure at least one member of the support team is "on duty" to watch for new user issues coming through the support system.
Roll out incrementally when possible, to a small number of users first, and gradually to more users.

Incrementing Version & Changelog

Version can be automatically incremented using our bump script.

npm run version:bump $BUMP_TYPE where $BUMP_TYPE is one of major, minor, or patch.

Preparing for Sensitive Changes

In the case that a new release has sensitive changes that cannot be fully verified prior to publication, please follow the sensitive release protocol.

Building

While we develop on the main develop branch, our production version is maintained on the master branch.

With each pull request, the @MetaMaskBot will comment with a build of that new pull request, so after bumping the version on develop, open a pull request against master, and once the pull request is reviewed and merged, you can download those builds for publication.

Publishing

Publish to chrome store.
Visit the chrome developer dashboard.
Publish to firefox addon marketplace.
Publish to Opera store.
Post on Github releases page.
Run the npm run announce script, and post that announcement in our public places.

Hotfix Differences

Our develop branch is usually not yet fully tested for quality assurance, and so should be treated as if it is in an unstable state.

For this reason, when an urgent change is needed in production, its pull request should:

Describe it as a hotfix.
Use a hotfix tag.
Should be proposed against the master branch.

The version and changelog bump should then be made off the master branch, and then merged to develop to bring the two branches back into sync. Further time can be saved by incorporating the version/changelog bump into the PR against master, since we rely on @MetaMaskBot to run tests before merging.

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