Releasing Grafana Loki

This document is a series of instructions for core Grafana Loki maintainers to be able to publish a new Grafana Loki release.

The general process for releasing a new version of Grafana Loki is to merge the release PR for that version. Every commit to branches matching the pattern release-[0-9]+.[0-9]+.x will trigger a prepare patch release workflow. This workflow will build release candidates for that patch, automatically generate release notes based on the commits since the last release, and update the long-running PR for that release. To publish the release, merge the PR.

Every commit to branches matching the pattern k[0-9]+ will trigger a prepare minor release workflow. This follows the same process as a patch release, but prepares a minor release instead. To publish the minor release, merge the PR.

Releasing a new major version requires a custom major release workflow to be created to run of the branch we want to release from. Once that workflow is created, the steps for releasing a new major are the same as a minor or patch release.