Release Process

How Pankha publishes releases. Releases are tagged manually; the body is composed automatically from PR labels.

Prerequisites

Push access to the Anexgohan/pankha repository
gh CLI authenticated for the optional manual dispatch path

Routine Release

Most releases need no authoring — just tag and push:

cd /root/anex/dev/pankha
git checkout main && git pull
git tag v0.4.25
git push --tags

GitHub Actions then:

Builds Rust agents (x64, ARM64, IPMI), Windows MSI, Docker images (amd64 + arm64)
Generates a categorised PR list from labels since the previous matching release
Composes the release body with install instructions
Uploads binaries + checksums as release assets
Publishes the GitHub Release

Total pipeline: ~10-15 minutes (Windows MSI is the long pole).

Release with Custom Highlights

For bigger releases that deserve a headline, edit the input template before tagging:

$EDITOR .github/input/release-notes.md

The file has commented sections for Highlights, Breaking Changes, Screenshots, and Notes. Delete what you don’t need, write into what you keep.

Embedding screenshots

Drop image files into .github/input/images/ and reference them in release-notes.md:

![Caption](./images/your-screenshot.png)

On release, the workflow uploads each image as a release asset and rewrites the URL to its permanent releases/download/... path.

Then tag and push

git add .github/input/
git commit -m "docs: stage release notes for v0.4.25"
git push
git tag v0.4.25 && git push --tags

After the release publishes, the workflow resets release-notes.md to the template and clears images/ automatically via a follow-up commit to main.

Pre-release vs Stable

The pipeline auto-detects pre-releases from the tag name:

Tag pattern	Treated as	Docker tags updated
`v1.2.3`	Stable	`:latest`, `:beta`, versioned
`v1.2.3-alpha`, `-beta`, `-rc`, `-pre`, `-preview`, `-dev`, `-canary`, `-nightly`, `-experimental`, `-insiders`, `-test`, `-testing`	Pre-release	`:beta`, `:testing`, versioned (NOT `:latest`)

Pre-releases are marked as such on the GitHub Releases page.

How the Body is Composed

The release body is structured as:

[Authored highlights — if release-notes.md was edited]

## What's Changed
### Features          # PRs labelled 'feature'
### Bug Fixes         # PRs labelled 'fix'
### Frontend / Backend / Agent Linux / ...   # alphabetical by label

<details>
<summary>Dependencies, CI, and chores</summary>
... folded PRs (dependencies always, plus ci/devops/chore-only)
</details>

[Install instructions — Docker, Linux x64/ARM64, Windows MSI, IPMI]

**Full Changelog**: vPREV...vCURRENT

Diff base (which PRs get included)

Stable tag (v1.2.3): diff against the previous stable, skipping pre-releases. So v1.2.3 notes summarise everything since v1.2.2, including all the alphas and betas in between.
Pre-release tag (v1.2.3-beta3): diff against the immediately previous tag of any kind. So beta3 only shows what’s new since beta2.

Categorisation

Categories are driven by PR labels, applied automatically by pr-labeler.yml:

Top tier (intent labels): breaking-change, feature, fix
Middle tier (area labels, alphabetical): agent-linux, agent-windows, backend, database, docker, frontend, license, vendor-profiles, documentation
Folded under <details>: PRs labelled dependencies (always), or PRs labelled only with ci/devops/chore
Other Changes: unlabelled PRs (trailing)

Adding a new label later automatically gets its own section — no code change required.

Refresh an Existing Release Body

If you spot a typo or want to update notes on a published release without rebuilding everything:

gh workflow run release-notes.yml --ref main \
  -f version=v0.4.25 \
  -f update_existing_release=true

Re-composes the body and applies it to the existing release in ~30 seconds. No agents rebuilt, no Docker images touched.

Release Assets

Every release publishes:

pankha-agent-linux_x64
pankha-agent-linux_arm64
pankha-agent-ipmi-linux_x64
pankha-agent-windows_x64.msi
config.example.json
compose.yml
example.env
checksums.txt (SHA256 of all of the above)

Plus the Docker images tagged on Docker Hub (anexgohan/pankha:vX.Y.Z and rolling tags).

Verifying After Publish

gh release view v0.4.25
# Should show: 8 assets, correct title, body with categorised PRs

If anything looks wrong, re-run notes (see above) before retrying the build.