beehive-flow

Beehive Flow is a git branching process and a supporting CLI tool. It is designed for packaged software and libraries, particularly those with many past versions requiring active support. Beehive Flow is prescriptive about what the project's version numbers are and how they change through the branching process. CI is explicitly considered in the process, with a set of commands to be run at different stages of the build.

Beehive Flow is designed to support publishing prerelease versions of each build of each branch. It does this by timestamping version numbers at the start of a build.

Beehive Flow is similar to GitLab flow with release versions, and is compatible with Semantic Versioning. It also takes inspiration from git-flow.

This readme is the canonical definition of the branching process. This git repo implements the branch process for NPM projects. Support for monorepos using yarn workspaces is planned.

Process Overview

beehive-flow uses the following branch names, each forming part of the process:

main
release/x.y
feature/FEATURE_CODE
hotfix/FEATURE_CODE
spike/FEATURE_CODE

Branch names and versions are strict and enforced.

All new work happens in feature/* branches which are merged to the main branch:

                       feature/BLAH-123
  main                 +-----------
 (x.y.0-rc)            |           \
  +--------------------+------------+-----

The main branch can be branched to release/x.y branches to maintain older minor versions. These branches are created from old releases with behive-flow revive:

  main
 (1.2.3)                    (2.1.5-rc)
  +- - - - - - - - - - - - - +--------------
  |
  ↓             [revive 1.2]:
  - - - - - - - - - - - - - - +-------------
                              release/1.2
                             (1.2.4-rc)

For advanced use-cases, a release/x.y branch can be created before x.y.0 is released, using beehive-flow prepare:

  main                 
 (1.2.0-rc)           (1.3.0-rc)
  +-----------------+--------------------                             
         [prepare]: |                             
                    +--------------------
                    release/1.2                  
                    (1.2.0-rc)

To make changes to a release/x.y branch, create a hotfix/* branch, cherry-pick from main, then merge:

  main
 (1.2.0-rc)
  +---------+---------------------------------
            |              | |  cherry-pick and tweak
            |              ↓ ↓
            |            +---------+  hotfix/BLAH-123
            |            |          \
            +------------+-----------+--------
            release/1.3
            (1.2.0-rc)

Beehive Flow is designed so that every commit can be published. To avoid conflicts with stable releases, the version in the package.json will almost always be a "release candidate" version like x.y.z-rc. A stable release takes place in two stages: beehive-flow release and beehive-flow advance-ci. The two-stage process is shown below:

 main
(1.2.4-rc)           (1.2.4)              (1.2.5-rc)
-+--------------------+--------------------+------------
            [release]:        [advance-ci]:

To perform a release, run either beehive-flow release main or beehive-flow release x.y, depending on whether you want to release from the main branch or a release/x.y branch. This will "stabilise" the version number on that branch, removing the -rc. From there, CI will publish your release and then run beehive-flow advance-ci to update that branch to the next release candidate version.

To avoid duplicate version numbers, beehive-flow stamp is run at the start of any CI build for a release candidate, which adds some metadata to the version string, such as the timestamp of the build, and the git SHA of the commit.

Preparing for release

To release a stable version (such as a.b.x) with Beehive Flow, you need to set the version of the branch you plan to release from to a.b.x-rc. The branch you release from should either be main, or release/a.b, which one you choose is based on the following questions:

Does the branch release/a.b exist?

If the branch release/a.b exists, then all releases of the form a.b.* should take place from that branch. The version set in this branch will already be a.b.x-rc, so no manual editing of the version is necessary.

Have you upgraded the main branch version above a.b.*?

If no release/a.b branch exists, but the version on main is already greater than a.b.*, you will need to create a release/a.b branch. Run beehive-flow revive a.b to create this branch, which will have its version automatically set to a.b.x-rc. Prepare your release on this branch.

Do you need a stabilisation period before your release?

If no release/a.b branch exists, and the version on main is a.b.x-rc, you have two options for releasing. The simple variant is to release directly from main, with the command beehive-flow release main. However, if you need to do work to stabilise this release (and want to do work on your next minor release with the main branch in parallel with this) then you'll need the advanced variant. In this case, run beehive-flow prepare, which will bump the version of the main branch to the next minor (a.c.0-rc) and create a release/a.b branch with version a.b.x-rc.

Minor and Major Upgrades

With the exception of prepare, which is for advanced use-cases only, the Beehive Flow tool will not perform minor or major version upgrades to any branch. You must manually upgrade the version in your package.json, which is allowed on any branch except a release/x.y branch. Be sure to keep the -rc at the end of your version number: changing 1.2.3-rc to 1.3.0-rc or 2.0.0-rc is fine, but changing 1.2.3-rc to 1.3.0 is not.

While Beehive Flow does not specify how to do these upgrades, we recommend upgrading the version number in the feature/* branch that introduces the first change that would require the upgrade. For example:

              feature/*
             (1.2.3-rc)     (1.3.0-rc)
 main         +--------------+--------+
(1.2.3-rc)    |                        \
 +------------+-------------------------+----------
                                       (1.3.0-rc)

Feature vs Spike branches

Feature branches are branched off main and are named feature/*. Most new work is done here. It doesn't matter if it's a feature, improvement, task, refactor, bugfix or any other type of change... except for spikes.

Spike branches are branched off main and are named spike/*. These are treated similarly to feature branches, but are just intended to indicate that the work is experimental and not to be merged.

About rc and prerelease versions

The only allowed prerelease version is "rc".

main and release/x.y alternate between rc and release versions. Any other prerelease version will error.

Other branches should always have "rc" versions, though this is not enforced.

When stamping, different prerelease versions are chosen based on the branch type (see below).

Commands

Note: the stamp, advance-ci and publish commands operate on a checkout in the current working directory, whereas the other commands make a fresh clone in a temp directory.

For a detailed description about command-line usage and arguments, run yarn beehive-flow --help or yarn beehive-flow --help COMMAND.

release main

This signifies that branch main is ready for release.

Version changes:

main: a.b.c-rc -> a.b.c

release a.b

This signifies that branch release/a.b is ready for release.

Version changes:

release/a.b: a.b.c-rc -> a.b.c

advance a.b

This signifies that branch release/a.b has been released and is ready to accept changes for the next patch release. This command is intended to be run manually. Usually, advance-ci should be used instead.

Version changes:

release/a.b: a.b.c -> a.b.d-rc

advance-ci

This command is similar to advance, however:

it works in a current directory
if the current directory is not a release branch in release ready state, it exits successfully, whereas advance errors
it doesn't have the git-url or version parameters

stamp

This command should be run at the start of a build. This command does the following:

Checks that the package.json file has a valid version for the branch.
Changes the version to a "timestamped" version, so that each build can be published (except for release versions).

The timestamping changes the package.json file. The idea is to build and publish, but not to commit the changes.

Versions are changed thus:

On a feature branch, a.b.0-* becomes a.b.0-feature.TIMESTAMP.sha-GITSHA
On a hotfix branch, a.b.c-* becomes a.b.c-hotfix.TIMESTAMP.sha-GITSHA
On a spike branch, a.b.c-* becomes a.b.c-spike.TIMESTAMP.sha-GITSHA
On a main or release branch in rc state, a.b.c-rc becomes a.b.c-rc.TIMESTAMP.sha-GITSHA
On a main or release branch in release state, no changes are made.

Timestamp format is yyyyMMddHHmmssSSS in UTC. The short git sha format is used.

Note: this command operates on the checkout in the current working directory.

revive a.b

This command allows a release/a.b branch to be created from previous release tags. This is useful if a hotfix needs to be backported to an older version. This command does the following:

Finds all tags that match the specified a.b version.
Sorts the tags and determines the most recent patch release.
Creates the new release/a.b branch from the tag.
Advances the version to the next RC patch release.

Version changes:

release/a.b: a.b.c -> a.b.d-rc

prepare

This signifies that main is ready for stabilization. main is branched as release/a.b, where a.b come from package.json

Version changes

main: a.b.x-rc -> a.c.0-rc
release/a.b: a.b.x-rc

publish

This command does an npm publish and sets npm tags based on the repository state.

feature/hotfix/spike branches are tagged with their branch name
main and release branches in rc state are tagged rc-a.b
main and release branches in release state are tagged release-a.b.
main and release branches in rc or release state are also tagged latest if this is the release with the highest version number.

beehive-flow publish also git tags any release builds as packagename@version.

Determining the `latest` build

When publishing, beehive-flow reads the existing NPM tags from the repo and uses those to determine whether or not to set latest on the new build. latest is set if the new build's number is "greater" than the existing build.

Note that all release builds are considered greater than all rc builds. So, for a new project, you may have a period where your latest tag only points to rc builds, but after your first release, latest will always point to a release build.

Note that the first publish of a build is always tagged latest.

status

This command prints out beehive-flow's interpretation the current status of the repo, in JSON format. This is useful for integrating with other CI tools.

Run this as yarn run --silent beehive-flow status otherwise yarn's output will make stdout invalid JSON.

Example:

$ yarn --silent beehive-flow status
{
  "currentBranch": "feature/TINY-6867",
  "version": {
    "major": 0,
    "minor": 11,
    "patch": 0,
    "preRelease": "rc"
  },
  "versionString": "0.11.0-rc",
  "branchType": "feature",
  "branchState": "feature",
  "isLatest": false
}

Note: this command will fail if the repo is in an invalid state.

Fields:

currentBranch - the current git branch
version - parsed version in package.json. Has major, minor and patch fields and may have preRelease and buildMetadata fields if present.
versionString - raw version string
branchType - one of: main, feature, hotfix, spike, release
branchState - state of the branch - similar to branchType, but splits release branches into 2 separate states. May be one of: main, feature, hotfix, spike, releaseCandidate, releaseReady
isLatest - If this version were to be published, would it be the latest build?

If you want to read this from a Jenkinsfile:

def shJson(String script) {
    def s = sh(script: script, returnStdout: true);
    return readJSON(text: s);
}

def beehiveFlowStatus = shJson("yarn run --silent beehive-flow status");

Then, if you want to run something when beehive-flow would publish a new release build of the latest release:

if (beehiveFlowStatus.branchState == 'releaseReady' && beehiveFlowStatus.isLatest) {

}

CI Instructions

CI needs to check out a real branch, not just a detached head.

At the start of the build, run stamp. If the build is successful, run advance-ci.

Adding beehive-flow to my project

These instructions assume Jenkins, yarn, TypeScript, mocha and eslint.

Best to disable CI during the changeover.
Ensure you have a "main" branch - e.g. change your "master" branch to "main"
yarn add -D @tinymce/beehive-flow

Change your Jenkinsfile to something like below. Note there are issues running beehive-flow publish from yarn (see FAQ below).

node("primary") {
  stage ("checkout") {
    checkout scm
  }

  stage("dependencies") {
    sh "yarn install"
  }

  stage("stamp") {
    sh "yarn beehive-flow stamp"
  }

  stage("build") {
    sh "yarn build"
  }

  stage("lint") {
    sh "yarn lint"
  }

  stage("test") {
    sh "yarn test"
  }

  stage("publish") {
    sshagent(credentials: ['my-git-credentials']) {
      sh "yarn beehive-flow publish"        
      sh "yarn beehive-flow advance-ci"
    }
  }
}

Note the yarn commands. Set up scripts in package.json to this effect. e.g.
```
"build": "tsc",
"lint": "eslint src/**/*.ts",
"test": "yarn mocha"
```

FAQ

Does beehive-flow work with yarn workspaces, lerna or monorepos?

Not yet, but this is planned.

Does beehive-flow work with any types of package other than NPM?

Not at this stage.

Are there issues running `beehive-flow publish` from yarn?

beehive-flow publish uses npm publish to publish. When running this via yarn, yarn sets the environment variable npm_config_registry to https://registry.yarnpkg.com. Depending on your CI config, this may cause you to get errors like this:

npm ERR! 404 Not Found - PUT https://registry.yarnpkg.com/@tinymce%2fbeehive-flow - Not found

To work around this, there are several options:

Run yarn config set registry https://registry.npmjs.org/ -g on your CI nodes (sets the registry in ~/.yarnrc)
Run yarn config set registry https://registry.npmjs.org/ in each project (sets the registry in the project's .yarnrc)
Set the publishConfig in your package.json file.
Instead of running from yarn, run npx --no-install beehive-flow publish. The --no-install forces npx to use your project's pinned beehive-flow and if it's not there, it fails instead of downloading the latest beehive-flow.

At Tiny, we're using option 1.

Name		Name	Last commit message	Last commit date
Latest commit History 536 Commits
.github		.github
src		src
.eslintrc.json		.eslintrc.json
.gitignore		.gitignore
.mocharc.yml		.mocharc.yml
.npmrc		.npmrc
.yarnrc		.yarnrc
CHANGELOG.md		CHANGELOG.md
CONTRIBUTING.md		CONTRIBUTING.md
Jenkinsfile		Jenkinsfile
LICENSE		LICENSE
README.md		README.md
mocha-multi-reporters-config.json		mocha-multi-reporters-config.json
package.json		package.json
tsconfig.json		tsconfig.json
yarn.lock		yarn.lock

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beehive-flow

Process Overview

Preparing for release

Minor and Major Upgrades

Feature vs Spike branches

About rc and prerelease versions

Commands

release main

release a.b

advance a.b

advance-ci

stamp

revive a.b

prepare

publish

Determining the `latest` build

status

CI Instructions

Adding beehive-flow to my project

FAQ

Does beehive-flow work with yarn workspaces, lerna or monorepos?

Does beehive-flow work with any types of package other than NPM?

Are there issues running `beehive-flow publish` from yarn?

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beehive-flow

Process Overview

Preparing for release

Minor and Major Upgrades

Feature vs Spike branches

About rc and prerelease versions

Commands

release main

release a.b

advance a.b

advance-ci

stamp

revive a.b

prepare

publish

Determining the latest build

status

CI Instructions

Adding beehive-flow to my project

FAQ

Does beehive-flow work with yarn workspaces, lerna or monorepos?

Does beehive-flow work with any types of package other than NPM?

Are there issues running beehive-flow publish from yarn?

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Determining the `latest` build

Are there issues running `beehive-flow publish` from yarn?