1.0 Release!
Tags: opensource, git, programming, github
Published: 2023-04-20 23:44:05

## My.Custom.Domain 1.0 (mycustomdomain.senecacollege.ca)

This week marks the conclusion of a semester long journey to deliver our opensource DNS and SSL certificate solution named My.Custom.Domain or [Starchart](https://github.com/DevelopingSpace/starchart). This Wednesday the team got together and watched David release the first real production build of the site and I had the honors of creating the PR for that release from main to the release branch. Unfortunately I had messed up and the changelog did not actually contain any changes (more on that in a second) and on top of that the site was acting a bit funny. 

Staging was working perfectly fine so after a bit of digging we decided that it must have been some of the AWS variables that ITS handed us that must have been wrong, David fixed that and the DNS records were working as intended but a unique constraint on the Order Urls were causing problems within the cert flow so a quick setting of orderURL to null upon update so that duplicate requests do not break things was done [#652](https://github.com/DevelopingSpace/starchart/pull/652).

Now back to how I messed up.

## Where are my changes logged?

To create a changelog upon release I had added an action to the release.yml which was supposed to create or update a tag named release and then find the differences between the previous release tag commit and the current release tag commit and generate a changelog of commits from that difference. This worked upon an initial attempt to release because the action was actually making the difference between the HEAD and the newly created release tag since there was no previous release tag at the time. Fast-forward to Wednesday and our release, the action does not work, I go into the action to see what is happening and it claims that there are 0 new commits from the last release tag, impossible I say! I don't know for a fact what was happening here but I suspect that since the name of the branch that initiates this workflow is also release the action got confused between the sha merged to the release branch and the sha of our last release tag. I tried replicating this in my own [test repo](https://github.com/sfrunza13/testingReleases) and was able to actually run into the exact same problem.

My solution was pretty simple, I changed the name of the tag to be something other than "release", in this case I changed it to "latest". Afterwards it worked:

![Image description](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/rnxug71qglcqa2n9vt47.png)

As has been the case with quite a few of my PRs thus far, the solution was a single word difference [#657](https://github.com/DevelopingSpace/starchart/pull/657).

## Concluding what is likely my last semester at Seneca...

...in this way is hilarious. A one word PR. Ha!

But on a more serious note I am really proud of this website, of the great people that I have worked with and learned from in this class, and very grateful that I could have this kind of experience thanks to David who is also responsible for the other courses that I think have most influenced me in how I think about developing: the previous open source course and the cloud computing course. 

I don't really know how to wrap this up, my experience with Seneca has really pleasantly surprised me and today I am happy and proud to hopefully be a future alumnus. 

Thank you to everyone.