~ 1 week before the release

• Check that any new deprecated annotations use the correct version name
• Check that open PRs and issues assigned to the milestone are reasonable
• Decide on planned release date 2019-03-19
• Notify depending projects (Akka persistence plugins) about the upcoming release
• Create a new milestone for the next version
• Check closed issues without a milestone and either assign them the 'upcoming' release milestone or invalid/not release-bound

1 day before the release

• Make sure all important / big PRs have been merged by now
• Communicate that a new version is about to be released in Gitter Akka Dev Channel, so that no new Pull Requests are merged

Preparing release notes in the documentation / announcement

• If this is a new minor (not patch) release, rename the 'alpakka-x.x-stable' and 'alpakka-supported-x.x-stable' reporting projects in WhiteSource accordingly (unfortunately this requires permissions that cannot be shared outside of Lightbend)
• Check readiness levels in /project/project-info.conf, and put in the release date for any new modules
• Add a release notes entry in docs/src/main/paradox/release-notes/ listing contributors generated by sbt-authors (eg. sbt authors v0.22 HEAD)
• Create a news item draft PR on akka.github.com, using the milestone
• Move all unclosed issues for this milestone to the next milestone
• Release notes PR has been merged

Cutting the release

• Make sure there are no stray staging repos on Sonatype
• Wait until master build finished after merging the release notes
• Create a new release with the next tag version v1.0-RC1, title and release description linking to announcement, release notes and milestone
• Check that Travis CI release build has executed successfully (Travis will start a CI build for the new tag and publish artifacts to Bintray and documentation to Gustav)
• Go to Bintray and select the just released version
• Go to the Maven Central tab, check the Close and release repository when done checkbox and sync with Sonatype (using your Sonatype TOKEN key and password)

Check availability

• Check the release on Maven central
• Check API and [reference]
  (https://doc.akka.io/docs/alpakka/1.0-RC1/) documentation

When everything is on maven central

• Log into gustav.akka.io as akkarepo and update the current links on repo.akka.io to point to the latest version with

  ln -nsf 1.0-RC1 www/docs/alpakka/current
  ln -nsf 1.0-RC1 www/api/alpakka/current
  

Announcements

• Merge draft news item for akka.io
• Send a release notification to Lightbend discuss
• Tweet using the akkateam account (or ask someone to) about the new release
• Announce on Gitter akka/akka

Afterwards

• If Cassandra has relevant changes, create/update PR in Akka Persistence Cassandra to upgrade to 1.0-RC1
• If Couchbase has relevant changes, create/update PR in Akka Persistence Couchbase to upgrade to 1.0-RC1
• Update version for Lightbend Supported Modules in private project
• Close the 1.0-RC1 milestone
• Close this issue