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+# Release process
+
+Before releasing a new version of Garage, our code pass through a succession of checks and transformations.
+We define them as our release process.
+
+## Trigger and classify a release
+
+While we run some tests on every commits, we do not make a release for all of them.
+
+A release can be triggered manually by "promoting" a successful build.
+Otherwise, every weeks, a release build is triggered on the `main` branch.
+
+If the build is from a tag following the regex: `v[0-9]+\.[0-9]+\.[0-9]+`, it will be listed as stable.
+If it is a tag but with a different format, it will be listed as Extra.
+Otherwise, if it is a commit, it will be listed as development.
+This logic is defined in `nix/build_index.nix`.
+
+## Testing
+
+For each commit, we first pass the code to a formatter (rustfmt) and a linter (clippy).
+Then we try to build it in debug mode and run both unit tests and our integration tests.
+
+Additionnaly, when releasing, our integration tests are run on the release build for amd64 and i686.
+
+## Generated Artifacts
+
+We generate the following binary artifacts for now:
+  - **architecture**: amd64, i686, aarch64, armv6
+  - **os**: linux
+  - **format**: static binary, docker container
+
+Additionnaly we also build two web pages:
+  - the documentation (this website)
+  - [the release page](https://garagehq.deuxfleurs.fr/releases.html)
+
+We publish the static binaries on our own garage cluster (you can access them through the releases page)
+and the docker containers on Docker Hub.
+
+## Automation
+
+We automated our release process with Nix and Drone to make it more reliable.
+Here we describe how we have done in case you want to debug or improve it.
+
+### Caching build steps
+
+To speed up the CI, we use the caching feature provided by Nix.
+
+You can benefit from it by using our provided `nix.conf` as recommended or by simply adding the following lines to your file:
+
+```toml
+substituters = https://cache.nixos.org https://nix.web.deuxfleurs.fr
+trusted-public-keys = cache.nixos.org-1:6NCHdD59X431o0gWypbMrAURkbJ16ZPMQFGspcDShjY= nix.web.deuxfleurs.fr:eTGL6kvaQn6cDR/F9lDYUIP9nCVR/kkshYfLDJf1yKs=
+```
+
+Sending to the cache is done through `nix copy`, for example:
+
+```bash
+nix copy --to 's3://nix?endpoint=garage.deuxfleurs.fr&region=garage&secret-key=/etc/nix/signing-key.sec' result
+```
+
+*Note that you need the signing key. In our case, it is stored as a secret in Drone.*
+
+The previous command will only send the built packet and not its dependencies.
+To send its dependency, a tool named `nix-copy-closure` has been created but it is not compatible with the S3 protocol.
+
+Instead, you can use the following commands to list all the runtime dependencies:
+
+```bash
+nix copy \
+  --to 's3://nix?endpoint=garage.deuxfleurs.fr&region=garage&secret-key=/etc/nix/signing-key.sec' \
+  $(nix-store -qR result/)
+```
+
+*We could also write this expression with xargs but this tool is not available in our container.*
+
+But in certain cases, we want to cache compile time dependencies also.
+For example, the Nix project does not provide binaries for cross compiling to i686 and thus we need to compile gcc on our own.
+We do not want to compile gcc each time, so even if it is a compile time dependency, we want to cache it.
+
+This time, the command is a bit more involved:
+
+```bash
+nix copy --to \
+  's3://nix?endpoint=garage.deuxfleurs.fr&region=garage&secret-key=/etc/nix/signing-key.sec' \
+   $(nix-store -qR --include-outputs \
+     $(nix-instantiate))
+```
+
+This is the command we use in our CI as we expect the final binary to change, so we mainly focus on
+caching our development dependencies.
+
+*Currently there is no automatic garbage collection of the cache: we should monitor its growth.
+Hopefully, we can erase it totally without breaking any build, the next build will only be slower.*
+
+In practise, we concluded that we do not want to cache all the compilation dependencies.
+Instead, we want to cache the toolchain we use to build Garage each time we change it.
+So we removed from Drone any automatic update of the cache and instead handle them manually with:
+
+```
+source ~/.awsrc
+nix-shell --run 'refresh_toolchain'
+```
+
+Internally, it will run `nix-build` on  `nix/toolchain.nix` and send the output plus its depedencies to the cache.
+
+To erase the cache:
+
+```
+mc rm --recursive --force 'garage/nix/'
+```
+
+### Publishing Garage
+
+We defined our publishing logic in Nix, mostly as shell hooks.
+You can inspect them in `shell.nix` to see exactly how.
+Here, we will give a quick explanation on how to use them to manually publish a release.
+
+Supposing you just have built garage as follow:
+
+```bash
+nix-build --arg release true
+```
+
+To publish a static binary in `result/bin` on garagehq, run:
+
+```bash
+export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=xxx
+export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=xxx
+export DRONE_TAG=handcrafted-1.0.0 # or DRONE_COMMIT
+export TARGET=x86_64-unknown-linux-musl
+
+nix-shell --run to_s3
+```
+
+To create and publish a docker container, run:
+
+```bash
+export DOCKER_AUTH='{ "auths": { "https://index.docker.io/v1/": { "auth": "xxxx" }}}'
+export DOCKER_PLATFORM='linux/amd64' # check GOARCH and GOOS from golang.org
+export CONTAINER_NAME='me/amd64_garage'
+export CONTAINER_TAG='handcrafted-1.0.0'
+
+nix-shell --run to_docker
+```
+
+To rebuild the release page, run:
+```bash
+export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=xxx
+export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=xxx
+
+nix-shell --run refresh_index
+```
+
+If you want to compile for different architectures, you will need to repeat all these commands for each architecture.
+
+**In practise, and except for debugging, you will never directly run these commands. Release is handled by drone**
+
+### Drone
+
+Our instance is available at [https://drone.deuxfleurs.fr](https://drone.deuxfleurs.fr).  
+You need an account on [https://git.deuxfleurs.fr](https://git.deuxfleurs.fr) to use it.
+
+**Drone CLI** - Drone has a CLI tool to interact with.
+It can be downloaded from its Github [release page](https://github.com/drone/drone-cli/releases).
+
+To communicate with our instance, you must setup some environment variables.
+You can get them from your [Account Settings](https://drone.deuxfleurs.fr/account).
+
+To make drone easier to use, you could create a `~/.dronerc` that you could source each time you want to use it.
+
+```
+export DRONE_SERVER=https://drone.deuxfleurs.fr
+export DRONE_TOKEN=xxx
+drone info
+```
+
+The CLI tool is very self-discoverable, just append `--help` to each subcommands.
+Start with:
+
+```bash
+drone --help
+```
+
+**.drone.yml** - The builds steps are defined in `.drone.yml`.  
+You can not edit this file without resigning it.
+
+To sign it, you must be a maintainer and then run:
+
+```bash
+drone sign --save Deuxfleurs/garage
+```
+
+Looking at the file, you will see that most of the commands are `nix-shell` and `nix-build` commands with various parameters.
+
+