Releasing a new Valkey version

Procedure for new releases

Start by coping this checklist into a new issue with the title of the release you are performing. If you are releasing a new patch (or release candidate), follow just the "New patch release section". If you are also starting a new major/minor release, also include that section.

New patch release

• 1. Make sure all commits from the corresponding project are merged. Example 7.2.
• 2. Submit a new PR that updates the version.h file along with updating the release notes.
  1. For generating release notes, one way to get all of the commits is to use the release tool (see the next step). You can specify two separate tags, and it will automatically print the name of the commits for each of the PRs that had a "release-notes" tag.
• 3. Cut a release here: https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey/releases/new. It should be based off of the target branch, e.g. "7.2", and the tag "7.2.5". When cutting the release, a new tag will automatically be created.
• 4. Once the new version is released, this should trigger the automation workflow on the valkey-release-automation repository. The automation workflow will update the valkey-hashes with the new release. It will also open the PRs for the valkey-container repository and also on valkey-io.github.io
• 5. Review and merge the PR created by the automation on valkey-container to update with the new version docker images.
• 6. Review and merge the PR created by the automation on valkey-io.github.io to update website with the new version downloads page.
• 7. The valkey-doc repository:
  • If the version we're releasing is the latest version (i.e. not a patch release of an older version), update the version info in the top of the Makefile. Example:

    # Version info
    VERSION ?= 8.0.2
    DATE ?= 2025-01-08
    

    This version info is used in the headers and footers of man pages by default, but can be overridden. Make the change as a PR to the doc repo and merge it.
  • Tag the version on the main branch. Example:

    git tag -m "Documentation for Valkey 8.0.2" 8.0.2
    git push --tags
    

  • Note: Our docs are not versioned, but we tag it anyway whenever we release a new version to get reproducible builds. This was requested by the Fedora packagers.

Major/minor release

Follow all of the steps of the patch release process above, but in addition.

• 9. Create a new release branch. We create branches for each major minor, so 7.2.0 will have the branch name 7.2.

• 10. Additional doc repo updates:

  1. Run the ruby script to extract module API docs (extracted from comments in src/module.c)

  ./utils/generate-module-api-doc.rb > $DOC_REPO/topics/topics/modules-api-ref.md
  

  2. Update the List of supported versions in the doc repo on topics/releases.md