After creating a ROS package in GitHub, we can officially release our package. ROS provides detailed steps to release the ROS package using a tool called bloom (http://ros-infrastructure.github.io/bloom/). Bloom is a release automation tool, designed to make platform-specific releases from the source projects. Bloom is designed to work best with the catkin project.

The prerequisites for releasing the package are as follows:

• Install the Bloom tool
• Create a Git repository for the current package
• Create an empty Git repository for the release

The following command will install bloom in Ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install python-bloom  

Create a Git repository for the current package. The repository that has the package is called the upstream repository. Here, we already created a repository at https://github.com/jocacace/mastering_ros_demo_pkg.

Create an empty repository in Git for the release package. This repository is called the release repository. We have created a package called demo_pkg-release.

After meeting these prerequisites, we can start to create the release of the package. Navigate to the mastering_ros_demo_pkg local repository where we push our package code to Git. Open a terminal inside this local repository and execute the following command:

$ catkin_generate_changelog  

The purpose of this command is to create a CHANGELOG.rst file inside the local repository. After executing this command, it will show this option:

Continue without -all option [y/N]. Give y here

It will create a CHANGELOG.rst in the local repository.

After the creation of the log file, we can update the Git repository by committing the changes:

$ git add -A
$ git commit -m 'Updated CHANGELOG.rst'
$ git push -u origin master