Releasing

Tag-driven releases: broker + operator images and the Helm chart, published to GHCR on every v0.2.N-preview tag.

The canonical, step-by-step procedure lives in docs/RELEASING.md in the repository — this chapter is the orientation summary.

The model

Pushing a semver tag to main triggers the release workflow (.github/workflows/docker-publish.yml), which builds and publishes three artifacts to GHCR:

• the broker image — ghcr.io/woestebanaan/kaas[-preview]
• the operator image — ghcr.io/woestebanaan/kaas-operator[-preview]
• the Helm chart — oci://ghcr.io/woestebanaan/charts/kaas

Pre-release tags (anything containing -, like v0.2.4-preview) get the -preview image-name suffix automatically; the chart's image helpers derive the same suffix from the tag, so the chart default always points at images that exist.

The two rules

1. Tags are immutable. Never re-cut or force-move a tag. A bad release is fixed by the next patch number, not by rewriting the old one.
2. Always bump the patch: v0.2.N-preview → v0.2.N+1-preview. (The one historical exception: the v0.1.190-preview → v0.2.0-preview jump at the Go→Rust cutover.)

Before tagging

cargo xtask ci green locally, CRDs regenerated if the operator API changed (cargo xtask gen-crds — CI fails on drift), and the book building cleanly (cargo xtask docs). If CRDs changed, remember the chart does not upgrade them automatically — release notes should say so.