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Release cadence

Stable Releases

Loki releases (this includes Promtail, Loki Canary, etc.) use the following naming scheme: MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH.

  • MAJOR (roughly once a year): these releases include large new features and possible backwards-compatibility breaks.
  • MINOR (roughly once a quarter): these releases include new features which generally do not break backwards-compatibility, but from time to time we might introduce minor breaking changes, and we will specify these in our upgrade docs.
  • PATCH (roughly once or twice a month): these releases include bug and security fixes which do not break backwards-compatibility.

Note

While our naming scheme resembles Semantic Versioning, at this time we do not strictly follow its guidelines to the letter. Our goal is to provide regular releases that are as stable as possible, and we take backwards-compatibility seriously. As with any software, always read the release notes and the upgrade guide whenever choosing a new version of Loki to install.

New releases are based of a weekly release which we have vetted for stability over a number of weeks.

We strongly recommend keeping up-to-date with patch releases as they are released. We post updates of new releases in the #loki channel of our Slack community.

You can find all of our releases on GitHub and on Docker Hub.

Weekly Releases

Every Monday morning, we create a new “weekly” release from the tip of the main branch. These releases use the following naming scheme:

    weekly-k<week-number> where <week-number> is the number of weeks since we began this process (2020-07-06).

These weekly releases are deployed across our Grafana Cloud Logs fleet of instances. We test these releases for stability by deploying them through development, pre-production, and production instances.

Generally these weekly releases are considered stable enough to run, but we provide zero stability guarantees and these releases should not be run in production unless you are willing to tolerate some risk.

You can find these releases on Docker Hub.

Which release will my merged PR be part of?

Once your PR is merged to main, you can expect it to become available in the next week’s weekly release. To find out which stable or weekly releases a commit is included in, use the following tool:

tools/which-release.sh

For example, this PR was merged into the commit named d434e80. Using the tool above, we can see that is part of release 2.8 and several weekly releases:

bash 
$ ./tools/which-release.sh d434e80                                 
Commit was found in the following releases:
  release-2.8.x
Commit was found in the following weekly builds:
  k136
  k137
  k138
  k139
  k140
  k141
  k142