Releasator

Releasator is a tool to perform reproducible releases. The maven-release-plugin is very good at its job, and is actually currently used by releasator to perform the hard work. However, it is very easy to use in an irreproducible way.

Reproducibility

The emphasis on reproducibility is very strong; for its sake, releasator has following features:

  • minimal parametrization
  • running each release in isolated sandbox
  • no interactivity supported
  • use dedicated, firewalled and shareless machine for releasator, as described in setup instructions.
  • use maven-enforcer-plugin in your corporate super-parent pom file, to enforce that every plugin called from build uses explicit version
  • your company maven repository (for instance, Nexus) uses a group with ONLY release repositories

Tracking changes

Releasator also maintains change track in its mandatory "changes.xml" file. It consists of

  • unreleased items - developer describes important changes since previous release here
  • release version records - releasator automatically turns "unreleased" part into a "release" during its run. It also adds various data about the conditions under which the release was running