Performing new releases is a core responsibility of any software project. It is even more important in the culture of Apache projects. Releases are the main flow of new code / features among the community of a project.

Beam is no exception: We aspire to keep a release cadence of about 6 weeks, and try to work with the community to release useful new features, and to keep Beam useful.

Configure a Java build to validate a Beam release candidate

First of all, it would be useful to have a single property in your pom.xml where you keep the global Beam version that you’re using. Something like this in your pom.xml:

<properties>
    ...
    <beam.version>2.26.0</beam.version>
    ...
</properties>
<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>org.apache.beam</groupId>
        <artifactId>beam-sdks-java-core</artifactId>
        <version>${beam.version}</version>
    </dependency>
    ...
</dependencies>

Second, you can add a new profile to your pom.xml file. In this new profile, add a new repository with the staging repository for the new Beam release. For Beam 2.27.0, this was https://repository.apache.org/content/repositories/orgapachebeam-1149/.

        <profile>
            <id>validaterelease</id>
            <repositories>
                <repository>
                    <id>apache.beam.newrelease</id>
                    <url>${beam.release.repo}</url>
                </repository>
            </repositories>
        </profile>

Once you have a beam.version property in your pom.xml, and a new profile with the new release, you can run your mvn command activating the new profile, and the new Beam version:

mvn test -Pvalidaterelease \
         -Dbeam.version=2.27.0 \
         -Dbeam.release.repo=https://repository.apache.org/content/repositories/orgapachebeam-XXXX/

This should build your project against the new release, and run basic tests. It will allow you to run basic validations against the new Beam release. If you find any issues, then you can share them before the release is finalized, so your concerns can be addressed by the community.

Configuring a Python build to validate a Beam release candidate

For Python SDK releases, you can install SDK from Pypi, by enabling the installation of pre-release artifacts.

First, make sure that your requirements.txt or setup.py files allow for Beam versions above the current one. Something like this should install the latest available version:

apache-beam<=3.0.0

With that, you can ask pip to install pre-release versions of Beam in your environment:

pip install --pre apache-beam

With that, the Beam version in your environment will be the latest release candidate, and you can go ahead and run your tests to verify that everything works well.

Configuring a Go build to validate a Beam release candidate

For Go SDK releases, you can fetch the Go SDK RC using go get, by requesting the specific pre-release version.

For example, to request the first release candidate for 2.44.0:

go get -d github.com/apache/beam/sdks/v2@v2.44.0-RC1

With that, the Beam version in your go.mod will be the specified release candidate. You can go ahead and run your tests to verify that everything works well.

You may need to also specify the RC’s matching container when running a job. Use the --environment_config flag to specify the release candidate container: eg. --environment_config=apache/beam_go_sdk:2.44.0rc1