Releasing A Patch

Say you’ve written a patch, and it’s been merged into Spinnaker. First off, thanks for helping the project! Odds are, you want to deploy this patch to the Spinnaker you manage. You have a few options available:

Wait for the non-patch release

Any time we release a new minor version of Spinnaker (e.g. 1.16.0 or 1.17.0), we include all commits merged into main for each service. We do this on a quarterly basis by default.

Release branch patch criteria

In order to be considered safe to merge into a release branch, your patch must:

• Fix a documented regression in a supported version of Spinnaker . This means that the currently broken functionality must have worked as expected in a previous version of Spinnaker. If the regression is not already documented in a GitHub issue, please create one. Describe the difference between the expected and observed behavior, and include links to the commit that introduced the regression. Indicate to which releases you would like your fix to be backported.
• Include tests validating the regression and the fix. The first commit of your patch pull request should add test coverage that demonstrates the existence of the bug and exercises all code paths potentially impacted by your fix. Subsequent commits should fix the bug and update the tests you just added. If your fix is so complex as to make complete tests coverage impossible, it is not a good candidate for merging into a release branch.

These criteria do not apply to security vulnerability patches, which may be merged into release branches at the discretion of the Security SIG and release manager.

Merge into the release branch

If your patch meets the cherry-pick criteria , you can request that your patch be merged into a release branch. Every minor release of Spinnaker has its own release branch. For example, all Spinnaker 2026.0.x releases (2026.0.1, 2026.0.2, etc.) are built from the release-2026.0.x release branch. To get your patch into 2026.0.x, it must be cherry-picked onto that release branch.

After you’ve created a pull request for a fix that you want backported to a release branch, add a comment that includes the following:

@spinnakerbot add-label backport-candidate

Release managers will audit all PRs with the backport-candidate label weekly. Please make sure your pull request description makes it easy for the release manager to evaluate whether your patch meets the release branch patch criteria.

Navigate to GitHub, and create a PR as you would normally, but make sure that your “base” is set to the release branch in the upstream repository as shown below:

{% include figure image_path="./patch.png" %}

Once this PR is merged, your patch should be released in the next few days.