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Release a new documentation version

When a new version of the Elastic Stack (or another versioned product) is released, the docs site must be updated to recognize it. This process primarily involves updating version metadata in the shared site configuration.

Generally, each release requires the following people:

  • A member of the docs team to perform release prep
  • A member of the docs engineering team to support publishing those changes to staging and prod.

Before you start your release, you should identify who from each of these teams will facilitate the release.

Follow these steps to release a new documentation version. There are two phases to releasing a new version:

  • Release prep: Prepare the relevant docs-builder changes. This can be done anytime before release day, and can be performed by any member of the docs team.
  • Release day activities: Merge your changes and push them to our staging and production environments. These steps must be performed on release day, and require support from docs engineering.

Anytime before release day, you can prepare the release-related changes. These changes can be bundled into a single PR.

Do not merge these changes until release day.

  1. [docs-builder PR] Update versions.yml

    This action can be performed by any member of the docs team. It's also automated for many products.

    The versions.yml file defines the base (minimum) and current (latest) versions of each versioned product family.

    Example:

    versioning_systems:
  stack: &stack
    base: 9.0
    current: 9.1.0
    • Update the current version to reflect the newly released version.
    • Only update the base version if you're dropping support for an older version.

    Refer to versions.yml for more information.

  2. [docs-builder PR] (Optional) Bump the version branch

    This action can be performed by any member of the docs team.

    If you use the tagged branching strategy, and your release corresponds with a new branch in the repository that holds your documentation, then you also need to bump the current and next branch in the docs configuration.

    This step is not always required, depending on your branching strategy. For example, if you only have branches for major versions of your product (e.g. 1 and 2), and you're already publishing your docs from the 1 branch, then you don't need to bump the version branch to release version 1.2 or 1.2.3 of your documentation.

    1. In assembler.yml, specifying the new current and next branches for your repository:

      your-product:
current: 1.1
next: 1.2

      Some people use main or master for their next branch. In this case, the next value doesn't need to be changed.

    2. Tag the PR with the ci label. After CI runs, confirm that the intended version branches are publishing to the link service. When links are being published as intended, they can be found at the following URL, where repo is your repo name and branch is your newly configured branch:

      elastic-docs-link-index.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/elastic/<repo>/<branch>/links.json

    3. Rerun the validate-assembler check on the PR.

    Learn more about changing the published branch.

  3. [docs-builder PR] (Optional) Update legacy URL mappings

    This action can be performed by any member of the docs team.

    If you're releasing a version older than the current base, or restoring support for a previously removed version, you may need to update the legacy-url-mappings.yml file.

    This file maps legacy URL paths (like en/elasticsearch/reference/) to the list of versions that exist at that path.

    For example, to release the 8.19 version of the Elastic Stack, update the stack versions array to include the new version number:

    - stack: &stack [ '8.19', '8.18', '8.17', ... ]

    See legacy-url-mappings.yml for more information.

Merge your changes and push them to our staging and production environments on release day.

  1. [docs-builder PR] Merge the config change

    Merge the versions.yml changes and any assembler and legacy URL mapping changes. Anyone from the docs team can merge the PR, but it must be approved by docs engineering or docs tech leads.

    Optionally, docs engineering or docs tech leads can invoke the Synchronize version & config updates action manually on docs-internal-workflows, which opens two configuration update PRs: staging and prod.

    This action also runs on a cron job, but can be triggered manually if the change is time-sensitive.

  2. Merge the config change to staging

    This action must be performed by docs engineering.

    1. Approve and merge the staging configuration update PR.

    2. Optionally, manually invoke the release automation to staging.

      This action also runs on a cron job, but can be triggered manually if the change is time-sensitive.

    Before you merge the config change to prod in the next step, make sure that the workflow run is green and wait for 10 to 15 minutes for any alerts to be raised.

  3. Merge the config change to prod and release to production

    This action must be performed by docs engineering.

    1. Approve and merge the prod configuration update PR.
    2. Manually invoke the release automation to production. Monitor it to make sure that it's green.
    3. Let the requester or docs release coordinator know the docs have been updated.

  4. Confirm applies_to metadata

    Cumulative documentation relies on version metadata through applies_to blocks, which use version definitions in versions.yml.

    Check the built output to ensure applies_to changes are correctly rendering.