Hotfixes

Hotfix releases in Runway are special releases that are created off the previous release tag rather than off your team's main working branch. In Runway, the hotfix release process is designed to be as streamlined as possible, and in some cases have special behavior to be aware of.

Preparing hotfix releases

You can create a hotfix release in the Runway app by clicking Prepare release > Hotfix.

You can then choose to create a roll-forward hotfix release by branching off your previous release's tag, or preparing a rollback release. For more information on how to set up, create, and ship rollbacks, visit the Rollbacks documentation.

By default, roll-forward hotfixes will branch off your live release's tag. You can choose whether you'd like Runway to immediately create a hotfix release branch and bump the version. If you leave these two options unchecked, you will still be able to manually create the release branch and bump the version from the Kickoff step, but doing it as part of the prepare hotfix flow helps streamline the process.

If your team uses a special release branch pattern for hotfix releases (e.g. hotfix-{version}), you can configure that in Integrations > Release branch patterns.

Pulling in (cherry-picking) fixes

You can also optionally select one or more commits from the working branch to pull in as fixes directly. Runway will attempt to cherry-pick the selected commits into the hotfix branch immediately.

If Runway is not able to cherry-pick directly to a release branch due to GitHub settings, Runway will create a PR in GitHub. In order to complete the cherry-pick, force-pushes must be allowed on the hotfix branch or on the PR branch in GitHub.

Conflicts can sometimes prevent Runway from cherry-picking in selected commits. When that happens, Runway will proceed with creating the hotfix release branch and bumping the version if needed, but will notify of the cherry-pick failure.

This functionality is supported in GitHub and GitLab.

Hotfixes and automations

To streamline the hotfix process, Runway will by default skip performing certain automations for hotfix releases. Automations that will be skipped for hotfixes are shown with an Inactive status in the Automations tab for the relevant step.

Automations that are skipped by default for hotfixes:

• Add latest build to the production track release (Google platforms only)

• Kick off release

• Bump version

• Trigger workflow post-kickoff

• Prepare rollback releases

• Submit for review

• Release app