release-process.md

Release Process

LazyDesktop releases are tag-driven: pushing a v* tag triggers the GitHub Actions release workflow, which builds every platform artifact and publishes a GitHub Release.

Versioning

• The project uses semantic versioning with a v prefix: v0.1.0, v0.2.0, …
• The current application version is defined in the crate manifests (Cargo.toml) and PKGBUILD (pkgver).
• Pre-releases (tags containing a pre-release segment, e.g. v0.2.0-beta.1) are published as prereleases on GitHub. Stable tags such as v0.2.0 are published as full releases.

Creating a release

1. Make sure main is green on CI (.github/workflows/ci.yml).

2. Check the roadmap to confirm the milestone's items.

3. Tag and push:

   git tag v0.2.0
   git push origin v0.2.0

4. The release workflow (.github/workflows/release.yml) builds:

   Job	Artifacts
   release-linux	.deb + .AppImage (ubuntu-24.04)
   release-arch	.pkg.tar.zst (Arch container)
   release-windows	.msi (windows-2022, WiX)

5. When all three platform jobs finish, create-release downloads all artifacts, generates a checksums.txt, and publishes the GitHub Release with auto-generated release notes.

What gets published

• lazydesktop_<version>_amd64.deb
• lazydesktop-<version>-x86_64.AppImage
• lazydesktop-<version>-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
• lazydesktop-<version>.msi
• checksums.txt

Local release builds

You can also build artifacts locally with the justfile — see packaging:

just release          # all artifacts

Notes / known issues

• The release workflow builds all artifacts with Cargo (cargo build --workspace --release). The local packaging scripts (debian/rules, PKGBUILD) use the same Cargo build.
• The Windows .msi harvests the target/release directory (the executable plus any adjacent runtime files) via deploy-msi.ps1.