Release guide

Release process - full release of `plotly` package

This is the release process for releasing plotly.py version X.Y.Z, including changelogs, GitHub release and forum announcement.

Finalize changelog

Review the contents of CHANGELOG.md. We try to follow the keepachangelog guidelines. Make sure the changelog includes the version being published at the top, along with the expected publication date.

Use the Added, Changed, Deprecated, Removed, Fixed, and Security labels for all changes to plotly.py. If the version of plotly.js has been updated, include this as the first Updated entry. Call out any notable changes as sub-bullets (new trace types in particular), and provide a link to the plotly.js CHANGELOG.

Update version numbers

Create a release branch git checkout -b release-X.Y.Z from the tip of origin/main.

Manually update the versions to X.Y.Z in the files specified below:
- pyproject.toml
  - update version
- CHANGELOG.md
  - update version and release date
  - finalize changelog entries according to instructions above
- CITATION.cff
  - update version and release date
Run uv lock to update the version number in the uv.lock file (do not update manually)

Commit and push your changes to the release branch:

$ git add -u
$ git commit -m "version changes for vX.Y.Z"
$ git push

Create a GitHub pull request from release-X.Y.Z to main and wait for CI to be green
On the release branch, create and push a tag for the release:
```
$ git tag vX.Y.Z
$ git push origin vX.Y.Z
```

Manual QA in Jupyter

We don't currently have automated tests for Jupyter, so we do this QA step manually.

The full_build job in the release_build workflow in CircleCI produces a tarball of artifacts output.tgz which you should download and decompress, which will give you a directory called output. The filenames within will contain version numbers; make sure the version numbers are correct.

Set up an environment with Jupyter, AnyWidget, and Pandas installed (pip install jupyter anywidget pandas). Then:

unzip downloaded output.tgz
pip uninstall plotly
pip install path/to/output/dist/plotly-X.Y.Z-py3-none-any.whl

You'll want to check, in both JupyterLab (launch with jupyter lab) and Jupyter Notebook (launch with jupyter notebook), that go.Figure() and go.FigureWidget() work as expected.

Notes:

Start by creating a brand new notebook each time so that there is no caching of previous results
Do not run the Jupyter commands from the root plotly.py/ directory on your machine because Jupyter may be confused by metadata from previous plotly.py builds

Code for testing go.Figure():

import plotly
import plotly.graph_objects as go

print(plotly.__version__)  # Make sure version is correct
fig = go.Figure(data=go.Scatter(x=[1, 2, 3, 4], y=[1, 3, 2, 4]))
fig.show()  # Figure should render in notebook

Code for testing go.FigureWidget():

import plotly
import plotly.graph_objects as go

print(plotly.__version__)  # Make sure version is correct
fig = go.Figure(data=go.Scatter(x=[1, 2, 3, 4], y=[1, 3, 2, 4]))
figure_widget = go.FigureWidget(fig)
figure_widget  # Figure should render in notebook

Once these are verified working, you can move on to publishing the release.

Merge the release PR and make a GitHub release

Merge the pull request you created above into main
Go to https://github.com/plotly/plotly.py/releases and "Draft a new release"
Enter the vX.Y.Z tag you created already above and make "Release title" the same string as the tag.
Copy the changelog section for this version into "Describe this release"
Upload the build artifacts downloaded in the previous step (.tar and .whl)

Publishing to PyPI

The final step is to publish the release to PyPI. You will need special permissions from Plotly leadership to do this..

You must install first install Twine (pip install twine) if not already installed.

Publishing to PyPI:

(plotly_dev) $ cd path/to/output
(plotly_dev) $ twine upload plotly-X.Y.Z*

You will be prompted to enter an API token; this can be generated in your PyPI account settings. Your account must have permissions to publish to the plotly project on PyPI.

Update documentation site

Search for the previous version string in the docs and replace it with the new version string, including but not necessarily limited to the following files:
- doc/apidoc/conf.py
- doc/requirements.txt
doc-prod should already have been merged on a regular basis into main, but start by doing it first if not. Then merge main into doc-prod to deploy the doc related to features in the release.
in a clone of the graphing-library-docs repo:
1. bump the version of plotly.py in _data/pyversion.json
2. bump the version of plotly.js with cd _data && python get_plotschema.py <PLOTLY.JS VERSION> fixing any errors that come up.
- If plotly.js contains any new traces or trace or layout attributes, you'll get a warning “missing key in attributes: <attribute-name>. To resolve, add the attribute to the relevant section in /_data/orderings.json in the position you want it to appear in the reference docs.
1. rebuild the Algolia schema index with ALGOLIA_API_KEY=<key> make update_ref_search
2. Rebuild the Algolia python index with ALGOLIA_API_KEY=<key> make update_python_search
3. Commit and push the changes to master in that repo

Notify Stakeholders

Post an announcement to the Plotly Python forum, with links to the README installation instructions and to the CHANGELOG.
Update the previous announcement to point to this one
Update the GitHub Release entry and CHANGELOG entry to have the nice title and a link to the announcement
Follow up on issues resolved in this release or forum posts with better answers as of this release

Release process - Release Candidate of `plotly` package

(rough notes for a rough/ad hoc process!)

It's the same process as above except that the X.Y.Z version has a suffix and there are special instructions below for publishing an RC: note that the npm suffix is -rc.1 and the PyPI suffix is rc1. We also don't update the docs with RC information and we inform a limited number of stakeholders.

PyPI RC (no special flags, just the rc1 suffix):

(plotly_dev) $ twine upload dist/plotly-X.Y.Zrc1*

The --tag next part ensures that users won't install this version unless they explicitly ask for the version or for the version with the next tag.

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