CI/CD

There are 4 main stages that run on GitHub actions:

• Build
• Unit Test
• Integration Test
• Release

There are some other stages that run for every push on the main branches:

• Microbenchmark
• Sync-branches

Scenarios

• Tests should be triggered on branch, tag and PR basis.
• Commits that are only affecting the docs files should not trigger any test or similar stages that are not required.
• Automated release in the CI gets triggered through a GitHub workflow.
• This is not the case yet, but if Github secrets are required then Pull Requests from forked repositories won't run any build accessing those secrets. If needed, then create a feature branch (opened directly on the upstream project).

How to interact with the CI?

On a PR basis

Once a PR has been opened then there are two different ways you can trigger builds in the CI:

1. Git commit based
2. UI based, any Elasticians can force a build through the GitHub UI

Branches

Every time there is a merge to main or any branches the whole workflow will compile and test on Linux and Windows.

Release process

To release a new version of apm-agent-java, you must use the two GitHub Workflows.

• Trigger the release-step-1 GH workflow
  • parameters: version to release
  • will open release-step-2 PR
• Review and merge the release-step-2 PR to main (version bump to release + changelog update)
• Trigger the release-step-3 GH workflow
  • parameters: version to release and the main branch (or merge commit/ref of release-step-2 PR merge).
  • will generate and publish release artifact through buildkite.
  • will open two PRs: release-step-4 and release-step-5
  • will wait on the release-step-4 PR to be merged and published (documentation update)
• Review and merge the release-step-4 PR to the "major branch", which is currently 1.x, the documentation effective build and publication can take a while.
• Review and merge the release-step-5 PR to main (version bump from release to next snapshot version)

The tag release follows the naming convention: v.<major>.<minor>.<patch>, where <major>, <minor> and <patch>.

OpenTelemetry

Every workflow and its logs are exported to OpenTelemetry traces/logs/metrics. Those details can be seen here (NOTE: only available for Elasticians).

Bump automation

updatecli is the tool we use to automatically update the specs the APM agents use.