Release Automation

[lidel]

Things we could automate with CI or Github Actions:

• create beta and release branches
• merge from master to the branch should trigger the build, sign & publish beta release to AMO and Chrome Web Store
  • caveat: firefox Beta is self-hosted and requires publishing .xpi + updating this manifest

Ref.

• Firefox signing
  • https://github.com/kewisch/action-web-ext/
    – upload and publish browser extensions to the Chrome web store
  • https://github.com/marketplace/actions/chrome-extension-upload-action
  • https://github.com/marketplace/actions/chrome-extension-upload-publish

[lidel]

We recently moved to Github Actions for running tests (#928), this would be the next step.
I believe these days we could match the level of relesse automation we have in ipfs-desktop:

1. publishing release builds and signs artifacts
2. artifacts are attached to the release
3. artifacts are published
   • Stable: to extension web stores (Mozilla's AMO and Google's Chrome Web Store)
   • Beta: self-hosted channel for Firefox, Beta channel for Chromium

[whizzzkid]

@lidel can we also make the following issues part of this?

• Publish IPFS companion on the Microsoft Edge Addons store #839
• Publish your extension to Microsoft Edge Addons website #1005

Once we can unblock releases and have automation around the release processes we can around #666

[meandavejustice]

I just added this for 🔗pin-tweet-to-ipfs, 🔗Here is the file to take a look at with the actions.

Here are some links to the actual actions used:

• 🔗build and sign for chrome
• 🔗publish for chrome
• 🔗publish for edge

🔗Here is a blog post with all of the steps for each webstore.

[lidel]

• Automating releases would be wonderful quality of life improvement! In the past, we had no APIs to do that reliably.
• Publishing to Edge is fine, as long it does not require any manual labor.
  • Would not include it in MVP tho, focus on existing stores (Firefox and Chrome). Microsoft account setup will be a time sink, and the time can be better spent elsewhere. We can add it later, after we smoke-test automation and are happy with it.