Releasing a new Valkey version

Major/minor release

TBD

New patch release

1. Merge all commits from the corresponding project. Example 7.2.

2. Submit a new PR that updates the version.h file along with updating the release notes.

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".

4. Once the new version is released, this should trigger the workflow to build binaries (example workflow) and upload them to the S3 bucket.

5. To update the download links on the website with the new binaries. Please publish a PR like this to the website repository - https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey-io.github.io

6. Update the valkey-hashes repository with the new release hash - https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey-hashes. To compute the SHA-256 hash, run the following command for the respective release version and submit a PR like this.

   VERSION=8.0.0-rc2;

   curl -LO https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey/archive/refs/tags/$VERSION.tar.gz && echo "\nhash" "valkey-$VERSION.tar.gz" "sha256" "$(shasum -a 256 $VERSION.tar.gz | cut -d " " -f 1)" "https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey/archive/refs/tags/$VERSION.tar.gz"

7. Update the valkey-container repository - How to build and publish new version Docker Image

8. 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.