Publish releases directly from Travis after applying a tag

[nicoddemus]

In the light of the current problems with metadata in 3.3 and in the interest of making the releases even easier, I would like for us to move to a "publish on tag" method which we have been applying successfully in a number of pytest plugins (notably pytest-xdist).

I propose to change our release process to:

1. Manually use our invoke tasks to run regendocs, changelog and push a PR with the changed contents (very similar to what we do today).
2. After the PR is approved, we push a tag and Travis publishes the package automatically.

Notably missing from the current approach is using devpi and testing the package manually (I have been using devpi-cloud-tester); I think today the tools are mature enough where this step is not necessary, plus we already test using tox, which ensures the package is working properly.

Further @jaraco and a few others use this approach successfully, which gives me further confidence.

This is not fully automated yet, but I believe is a step in that direction nonetheless.

[pytestbot]

GitMate.io thinks the contributor most likely able to help you is @RonnyPfannschmidt.

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

i was also intending to automate it in the following way

a) have pytestbot publish those regendoc executed branches to the pytest repo (because pushing tags to a pr only really works when we do it on the main repo)
b) create a own pypi upload tool because @TravisCI pypi deploys are broken and incorrectly report success/failure since years now - basically travis cant be trusted with correct tooling there

[nicoddemus]

a) have pytestbot publish those regendoc executed branches to the pytest repo

By opening a PR you mean? Yeah that sounds like a plan. I was thinking this should be triggered by any merge to master or features.

We could have an app running somewhere that receives a merge event via webhooks, and then clones pytest/creates virtualenv/runs invoke regen/pushes a PR against the merged branch.

@conda-forge has a bot running in Heroku which does similar things (they listen for specific comments like @conda-forge-admin please rerender and that triggers the rerendering process in a PR; the bot then pushes the new commits).

because pushing tags to a pr only really works when we do it on the main repo

Actually it works, I've done this a few times already: by pushing the tag, you also push the PR's commits to the main repository. 😉

b) create a own pypi upload tool because @TravisCI pypi deploys are broken and incorrectly report success/failure since years now - basically travis cant be trusted with correct tooling there

I see what you mean, but I would like to follow with just using Travis deploy tool for now; I understand it may fail to deploy and still pass, but the worst outcome of that (while annoying) is just having to make a upload manually. Having a new invoke task for that seems like a good addition, but shouldn't block the main proposal here IMHO.

In summary I definitely like your ideas (they actually match what I had in the back of my mind for some time as well), but would like to implement what I mention in the initial post soon because it will simplify our deployment process at a very low cost. Your other suggestions are definitely a nice follow up.

[RonnyPfannschmidt]

ah, i misunderstood the intent there - pushing tags to the main repo should indeed work
thanks for the clarification - its indeed a good progression