Releases

This is a guide on preparing and releasing new ESBMC versions.

Warning

This guide is meant for developers of ESBMC with permissions for releasing new versions. It will not work if you don’t have appropriate permissions.

To create a new ESBMC release on GitHub, follow these steps:

Create a Branch for the Release

Create a branch appropriately named for this release and switch to it, in this case:

git switch -c v8.1

Update the Release Notes

Update the release notes in /scripts/release-notes.txt to reflect the changes included in the new version.

Tip

You can use Claude or any other LLM for this, just use this command to get the differences from the last tag git log v8.0..master --oneline > /tmp/commits-for-release.txt (in this case being v8.0) and instruct it to update the file for the next version.

Update the Project Version

Update the project version by modifying /CMakeLists.txt. Specifically the macros ESBMC_VERSION_MAJOR, ESBMC_VERSION_MINOR, ESBMC_VERSION_PATCH to include the desired version number.

Commit and Push to the Branch

Commit the changes and push them to the branch created earlier. Then submit a PR. Name the commit appropriately, in this case update: bump version to v8.1.

git add scripts/release-notes.txt CMakeLists.txt
git commit -m "update: bump version to v8.1"
git push

Create the PR

Note

You can do this from the GitHub UI as well. But for convenience I show the commands.

Make sure to change the title and body to your version number.

gh pr create \
    --title "update: bump version to v8.1" \
    --body "Bump version to v8.1 and update release notes."

Await PR to be Merged

Allow 2 other maintainers to review your PR as usual, approve and merge it.

Tagging the Commit

Create a tag for the commit with the version change, make sure to name it according to the version you’re releasing. In this case v8.1:

git tag v8.1

Push the tag to origin:

git push --tags

Important

Pushing a v* tag automatically triggers the Release workflow (“Upload Release Asset”). It builds every platform and creates a draft GitHub release named after the tag (e.g. ESBMC v8.1), with the canonical esbmc-linux.zip, esbmc-windows.zip, esbmc-macos.zip and esbmc.info assets already attached. You do not need to run the workflow manually, create the release by hand, or upload any artifacts yourself.

Publish the Draft Release

Wait for the Release workflow to finish, then open the repository’s Releases page and find the draft release the workflow created for your tag.

Confirm the attached assets are present: esbmc-linux.zip, esbmc-windows.zip, esbmc-macos.zip and esbmc.info.
Adjust the title if needed — the draft is created as ESBMC v8.1; past releases use “Release 8.1” (note the missing v).
Replace the placeholder description with a markdown version of the content written in /scripts/release-notes.txt from earlier.
Publish the release.

Tip

You can use Claude or any other LLM to prepare the release description.

Intermediate Algorithms SV-COMP and Test-COMP