Open-source releases: Everything we've learnt in 4 years
summary
step-ca and step CLI run as two mature open-source projects with ~11k stars each, 800 forks and ~1,500 known users, with over 97% of code still written by the core team. Releases ship monthly via GitHub Actions plus GoReleaser, producing multi-platform binaries, Debian/RPM packages and S3-hosted artifacts; the pipeline works but retains manual steps. Latency on workflow changes is 20–40 minutes, SSH debugging eases testing, and versioning shifts to date-based tags; distro inclusion remains unresolved.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:12Open-source maintenance challenges
- 7:00Release management strategies
- 13:05Linux distribution packaging
- 15:58Versioning switch
- 17:11Community support burden
- 23:57Controlled contributions
- 31:05Key lessons in open-source








