---
title: "Release cadence | Grafana Loki documentation"
description: "How our release process works"
---

# Release cadence

## Stable Releases

Loki releases (this includes [Promtail](/docs/loki/v2.9.x/send-data/promtail/), [Loki Canary](/docs/loki/v2.9.x/operations/loki-canary/), etc.) use the following naming scheme: `MAJOR`.`MINOR`.`PATCH`.

- `MAJOR` (roughly once a year): these releases include large new features & 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 & security fixes which do not break backwards-compatibility.

> **NOTE:** While our naming scheme resembles [Semantic Versioning](https://semver.org/), 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](/docs/loki/v2.9.x/release-notes/) and the [upgrade guide](/docs/loki/v2.9.x/setup/upgrade/) whenever choosing a new version of Loki to install.

New releases are based of a [weekly release](#weekly-releases) 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](/docs/loki/v2.9.x/community/getting-in-touch/).

You can find all of our releases [on GitHub](https://github.com/grafana/loki/releases) and on [Docker Hub](https://hub.docker.com/r/grafana/loki).

## Weekly Releases

Every Monday morning, we create a new “weekly” release from the tip of the [`main` branch](https://github.com/grafana/loki). 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](https://hub.docker.com/r/grafana/loki/tags?page=1&name=k).

### 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](#weekly-releases). 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](https://github.com/grafana/loki/pull/7472) was [merged](https://github.com/grafana/loki/pull/7472#event-8431624850) into the commit named `d434e80`. Using the tool above, we can see that is part of release 2.8 and several weekly releases:

Bash ![Copy code to clipboard](/media/images/icons/icon-copy-small-2.svg) Copy

```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
```