source: General/Releases.md
# LibreNMS Releases

#### Introduction
We try to ensure that breaking changes aren't introduced by utilising various automated 
code testing, syntax testing and unit testing along with manual code review. However 
bugs can and do get introduced as well as major refactoring to improve the quality of 
the code base.

#### Development branch
Our `master` branch is our dev branch, this is actively commited to and it's not uncommon 
for multiple commits to be merged in daily. As such sometimes changes will be introduced 
which will cause unintended issues. If this happens we are usually quick to fix or 
revert those changes.

We appreciate everyone that runs this branch as you are in essence secondary testers to 
the automation and manually testing that is done during the merge stages.

You can configure your install (this is the default) to use this branch by setting `$config['update_channel'] = 'master';` 
in `config.php` and ensuring you switch to the master branch with `git checkout master`.

#### Stable branch
With this in mind, we provide a monthly stable release which is released on or around 
the last Sunday of the month. Code pull requests (aside from Bug fixes) are stopped days 
leading up to the release to ensure that we have a clean working branch at that point.

The releases are titled after that month in the format `YYYYMM`, i.e `201608`. The 
Changelog is also updated and will reference the release number and date so you can see 
what changes have been made since the last release.

To switch to using stable branches you can set `$config['update_channel'] = 'release';` 
in config.php and then switch to the latest release branch with `git fetch --tags && git checkout $(git describe --tags $(git rev-list --tags --max-count=1))`.

