Image Builder Releases

The current release of Image Builder is v0.1.40 (December 3, 2024). The corresponding container image is registry.k8s.io/scl-image-builder/cluster-node-image-builder-amd64:v0.1.40.

Release Process

Releasing image-builder is a simple process: project maintainers should be able to follow the steps below in order to create a new release.

Create a tag

Releases in image-builder follow semantic versioning conventions. Currently the project tags only patch releases on the main branch.

  • Check out the existing branch and make sure you have the latest changes:
    • git checkout main
    • git fetch upstream
      • This assumes you have an “upstream” git remote pointing at github.com/kubernetes-sigs/image-builder
    • git rebase upstream/main
      • If the HEAD commit isn’t meant for release, reset to the intended commit before proceeding.
  • Ensure you can sign tags:
    • Set up GPG, SSH, or S/MIME at GitHub if you haven’t already.
    • export GPG_TTY=$(tty)
      • If signing tags with GPG, makes your key available to the git tag command.
  • Create a new tag:
    • export IB_VERSION=v0.1.x
      • Replace x with the next patch version. For example: v0.1.41.
    • git tag -s -m "Image Builder ${IB_VERSION}" ${IB_VERSION}
    • git push upstream ${IB_VERSION}

Promote Image to Production

Pushing the tag in the previous step triggered a job to build the container image and publish it to the staging registry.

  • Images are built by the post-image-builder-push-images job. This will push the image to a staging repository.
  • Wait for the above post-image-builder-push-images job to complete and for the tagged image to exist in the staging directory.
  • If you don’t have a GitHub token, create one via Personal access tokens. Make sure you give the token the repo scope.
  • Make sure you have a clone of k8s.io otherwise the next step will not work.
  • Create a GitHub pull request to promote the image:
    • export GITHUB_TOKEN=<your GH token>
    • make -C images/capi promote-image
    • Note: If your own fork isn’t used as the origin remote you’ll need to set the USER_FORK variable, e.g. make -C images/capi promote-image USER_FORK=AverageMarcus

This will create a PR in k8s.io and assign the image-builder maintainers. Example PR: https://github.com/kubernetes/k8s.io/pull/5262.

When reviewing this PR, confirm that the addition matches the SHA in the staging repository.

Publish GitHub Release

While waiting for the above PR to merge, create a GitHub draft release for the tag you created in the first step.

  • Visit the releases page and click the “Draft a new release” button.

    • If you don’t see that button, you don’t have all maintainer permissions.

  • Choose the new tag from the drop-down list, and type it in as the release title too.

  • Click the “Generate release notes” button to auto-populate the release description.

  • At the top, before ## What's Changed, insert a reference to the container artifact, replacing x with the patch version:

    This release of the image-builder container is available at:

`registry.k8s.io/scl-image-builder/cluster-node-image-builder-amd64:v0.1.x`

  • Proofread the release notes and make any necessary edits.

  • Click the “Save draft” button.

  • When the pull request from the previous step has merged, check that the image-builder container is actually available. This may take up to an hour after the PR merges.

    • docker pull registry.k8s.io/scl-image-builder/cluster-node-image-builder-amd64:${IB_VERSION}

  • When docker pull succeeds, return to the GitHub draft release, ensure “Set as the latest release” is true, and click the “Publish release” button.

Update Documentation

There are several files in image-builder itself that refer to the latest release (including this one).

Run make update-release-docs and then create a pull request with the generated changes.

Wait for this PR to merge before communicating the release to users, so image-builder documentation is consistent.

Publicize Release

In the #image-builder channel on the Kubernetes Slack, post a message announcing the new release. Include a link to the GitHub release and a thanks to the contributors:

Image-builder v0.1.41 is now available: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/image-builder/releases/tag/v0.1.41
Thanks to all contributors!