awx/docs/release_process.md

# Releasing AWX (and awx-operator)

The release process for AWX is completely automated as of version 19.5.0.

## Staging the release

To stage the release, maintainers of this repository can run the [Stage Release](https://github.com/ansible/awx/blob/devel/.github/workflows/stage.yml) workflow. To start the workflow, follow this series of events:

1. Click "Actions" in the top nav bar on the repository
2. Click "Stage Release" in the left nav menu
3. Click the "Run workflow" dropdown
4. Populate the inputs
5. Click the "Run workflow" button

![Staging AWX](img/stage-release.png)

This workflow will:

- Build awx from devel
- Build awx-operator from devel
- Run smoke tests
- Create a draft release for both `ansible/awx` and `ansible/awx-operator`

Once complete, navigate to the [Releases page](https://github.com/ansible/awx/releases) for AWX and verify things look ok. The changelog is automatically generated using the [special comment in our Pull Request template](https://github.com/ansible/awx/commit/dc0cc0f910900c506fb6f6ce4366e0e0d1d0ee87). If things look ok, click the pencil icon on the draft:

![Verify draft release](img/verify-draft-release.png)

Next, click "Publish Release":


![Publish release](img/publish-release.png)


Once the release is published, another workflow called [Promote Release](https://github.com/ansible/awx/actions/workflows/promote.yml) will start running:

![Promote release](img/promote-release.png)

Once it finished, verify that the new image is present on the [Repository Tags](https://quay.io/repository/ansible/awx?tag=latest&tab=tags) on Quay:


![Verify released AWX image](img/verify-released-awx-image.png)

Once the AWX image is live, go to the [Releases page for awx-operator](https://github.com/ansible/awx-operator/releases) and follow the same process to publish the release. Once published, the workflow [Promote AWX Operator image](https://github.com/ansible/awx-operator/actions/workflows/promote.yaml) will run.

Once complete, verify the image is on the [awx-operator Quay repository](https://quay.io/repository/ansible/awx-operator?tab=tags):

![Verify released awx-operator image](img/verify-released-awx-operator-image.png)