Packaging and release

Packaging is qgis-plugin-ci. It builds the zip with git archive and reads CHANGELOG.md for the release notes. The plugin itself has no build step: the geoservercloud and xmltodict wheels in geoserver_manager/extras/ are committed, and CI compiles the translations.

python -m pip install -U -r requirements/packaging.txt

# a zip numbered with the latest version of CHANGELOG.md
qgis-plugin-ci package latest

CI packages each pull request and each push to main. The version is the one in metadata.txt followed by the commit count, such as 0.1.0.270. The site publishes main’s zip with its plugins.xml, so QGIS offers each new build as an update to a tester who added that repository. A tag is packaged as its own version.

CI rejects a plugin archive of 1 MB or more, on a tag too, before anything is published. If the archive grows unexpectedly, check whether the bundled wheel was replaced with the upstream one. The shipped copy has the 15 MB of acceptance-test fixtures stripped out, which takes it from 16 MB to 49 KB. Strip a new wheel the same way on every version bump, and keep GSC_REQUIRED in toolbelt/dependencies.py equal to what is shipped. A test asserts that those two agree.

Release a version

One released version is one git tag, and the continuous deployment does the rest. For a tag X.Y.Z, which must be SemVer:

  1. Move the Unreleased entries of CHANGELOG.md under a new ## X.Y.Z - YYYY-MM-DD heading. This text becomes the release notes and the description on the plugin repository, so read it once as a stranger would.

  2. Set version=X.Y.Z in geoserver_manager/metadata.txt. Drop experimental=True when the release is no longer experimental.

  3. Tag and push:

    git tag -a X.Y.Z -m "X.Y.Z"
git push origin X.Y.Z

  4. The tag triggers Package and release. The job builds the zip, creates the GitHub release, and publishes to the QGIS plugin repository with the OSGEO_USER and OSGEO_PASSWORD secrets.

The first upload decides the plugin’s permanent identifier there: the package folder name, geoserver_manager. It cannot change afterwards; a different folder name would be a different plugin. Once the plugin exists on that repository, set its numeric id as official_repository_id in docs/conf.py. Then the deployment snippet on the installation page is right.

If a tag went out wrong, remove it and try again:

git tag -d X.Y.Z
git push origin :refs/tags/X.Y.Z