Release Guide

We release Cesium on the first work day of every month. Releases are available on the downloads page.

There is no release manager; instead, our community shares the responsibility. Any committer can create the release for a given month, and at any point, they can pass the responsibility to someone else, or someone else can ask for it. This spreads knowledge, avoids stratification, avoids a single point of failure, and is beautifully unstructured.

Release testing

1. Make sure you are using the latest drivers for your video card.
2. Make sure you have a clean checkout of master.
3. Check for show stoppers.
4. Send out a courtesy email to dev list to let people know you're about to start the release process.
5. Start the server ./Tools/apache-ant-1.8.2/bin/ant clean build combine runServer
6. If running on Windows, each browser should be tested with ANGLE enabled. The state of ANGLE can be verified using WebGL Report.
7. Run unit tests in Chrome stable.
8. Run unit tests in Firefox stable.
9. Run Sandcastle on the browser of your choice and run through each demo to make sure they all work.
10. Uninstall Chrome Frame if you have it installed.
11. Using Internet Explorer, navigate to Cesium Viewer and make sure you are prompted to install Chrome Frame. There's no need to actually install it. This step ensures that Cesium fails gracefully on non-WebGL browsers and allows developers to take alternative action.
12. Make sure the documentation builds without errors: ./Tools/apache-ant-1.8.2/bin/ant clean generateDocumentation
13. If any of the above steps fail, contact the forum to figure out what needs to be fixed before we can release. Do NOT release until all steps are passing.

Packaging for release

1. Update CHANGES.md with the date of the release.
2. Update build.xml with the version being released, e.g., <property name="version" value="b7" />
3. Create a tag, e.g.,
   • git tag -a b7 -m 'b7 release'
   • git push --tags
4. Create a zip file of the build ./Tools/apache-ant-1.8.2/bin/ant clean makeZipFile
5. Upload the zip to the downloads page.
6. Write a blog with a link to CHANGES.md, highlights for the release, and choice screenshots.

Also, see our release discussion on the forum.