Release 18.8.1

Preparation

Stable branches for GitLab Managed Versioning projects are required to have a green pipeline to perform a patch release. For each of the following branches verify the pipeline is green:

• GitLab
  • 18-8-stable-ee
• cng-ee
  • 18-8-stable
• gitaly
  • 18-8-stable
• gitlab-pages
  • 18-8-stable
• omnibus-gitlab-ee
  • 18-8-stable
• gitlab_kas
  • 18-8-stable

If a failure is found the resolution process differs between each project:

• For GitLab project failures, follow the broken stable branch process.
• For GitLab components, contact the maintainers and notify them about the failure.

• Ensure that any post-deploy migrations in the stable branch have been executed on GitLab.com by executing the post-deploy migration pipeline: /chatops run post_deploy_migrations execute.

Packaging

• Check if mirroring synced stable branches to dev. If the output is ✅ for every repo, we can proceed to tag. Note. If GitLab Canonical to Security mirroring has diverged on the default branch due to security merges this mirror is expected to show as a broken and can be safely ignored.

  /chatops run mirror status

• Tag 18.8.1 and confirm the job has finished:

  /chatops run release tag 18.8.1

• While waiting for packages to build, review and complete the blog post. => gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com!142314 (merged)

  • If the blog post failed to generate, it can be generated manually from the release-tools project with rake release:patch_release_blog_post.

• Check the progress of EE/CE container images in CNG

  • CE
  • EE
  • UBI
  • FIPS

• Check the progress of EE/CE packages in Omnibus

  • EE
  • CE

Note this may take a while (around 80 minutes).

Deploy

• For patch releases, the only available environment for deploys is release.gitlab.net. All GitLab Inc. team members can login to that installation using their email address (through google oauth).
• Deployment to release.gitlab.net will only be performed for the current release version. If a previous version is being released, you can move to the next section and begin publishing.

release.gitlab.net

• Deployments to release.gitlab.net are performed automatically.

Instructions to manually deploy if required.

If you need to manually run a deployment, you can do so as follows:

/chatops run deploy 18.8.1-ee.0 release

• Verify the deployment to release.gitlab.net has successfully completed. A slack notification will be posted in #announcements.

Release

• Publish the packages via ChatOps:

  /chatops run publish 18.8.1

• Verify that the chatops publish pipeline created by running the above command succeeded.
• Retry any failed pipelines for 18.8.1. Chatops job logs:https://ops.gitlab.net/gitlab-org/release/tools/-/jobs/22116286
• Verify the check-packages job completes successfully on the EE Pipeline
• Verify the check-packages job completes successfully on the CE Pipeline
• Verify that Docker images appear on hub.docker.com: EE / CE

Final steps

Before publishing the blog post ⚠️

• Confirm how to proceed with the blog post (see 🔒 internal link for more details)

• Merge the blog post.
• Notify the patch release has been published (blog post link needs to be replaced with the actual link).

  /chatops run notify ":mega: GitLab Patch Release:  has just been released: <blog post link>! Share this release blog post with your network to ensure broader visibility across our community.
  When is the next Release? Check it on the 'Release Information' dashboard: https://dashboards.gitlab.net/d/delivery-release_info/delivery3a-release-information?orgId=1"

• Create the 18.8.1 version on version.gitlab.com.

Release Certification

The release certification process may apply to this release. cc @gitlab-com/gl-security/product-security/federal-application-security