Plugins Versioning

Incrementing versions

For more information on how Kubebuilder release versions work, see the semver documentation.

Project versions should only be increased if a breaking change is introduced in the PROJECT file scheme itself. Changes to the Go scaffolding or the Kubebuilder CLI do not affect project version.

Similarly, the introduction of a new plugin version might only lead to a new minor version release of Kubebuilder, since no breaking change is being made to the CLI itself. It’d only be a breaking change to Kubebuilder if we remove support for an older plugin version. See the plugins design doc versioning section for more details on plugin versioning.

Introducing changes to plugins

Changes made to plugins only require a plugin version increase if and only if a change is made to a plugin that breaks projects scaffolded with the previous plugin version. Once a plugin version vX is stabilized (it doesn’t have an “alpha” or “beta” suffix), a new plugin package should be created containing a new plugin with version v(X+1)-alpha. Typically this is done by (semantically) cp -r pkg/plugins/golang/vX pkg/plugins/golang/v(X+1) then updating version numbers and paths. All further breaking changes to the plugin should be made in this package; the vX plugin would then be frozen to breaking changes.

You must also add a migration guide to the migrations section of the Kubebuilder book in your PR. It should detail the steps required for users to upgrade their projects from vX to v(X+1)-alpha.