Add a release candidate

What this does

Creates a release candidate (RC) — the unit that represents “this bundle of changes is about to ship.” Everything else — analysis, findings, runs — hangs off of it.

Why the release candidate is the anchor

A release candidate can bundle projects across several repositories, so a release that touches multiple services gets one combined safety check instead of one per repository. Each project inside it compares an anchor (what’s currently live) against a candidate branch or tag (what’s about to ship). Once every project has genuinely reached production — by tag or by branch, depending on its release strategy — the RC can be marked released. The “X/Y ready” progress on each release card counts how many of its projects have a completed, up-to-date analysis; it’s the RC, not a single commit or pull request, that answers “am I ready to ship.”

Prerequisites

At least one project.

Steps

1. In the left navigation, under Regression Guard, click Releases, then Add Release Candidate.
2. Name the release — for example, “backend + frontend.”
3. Check the projects that belong to this release. Not every project you’ve set up has to be checked for every release — if only the backend is shipping this time, leave the rest unchecked.

CI mode

CI mode turns an RC from a one-off release attempt into a standing, continuous one. It’s set once at creation and can’t be changed afterward.

• Off — normal lifecycle: analyze, wait for production to catch up, mark released. Reopens if production advances again.
• On — never surfaces “released.” It just keeps re-analyzing as new commits land on the branch, and is exempt from the production freeze that otherwise blocks a non-CI project pending re-analysis.

Turn it on when you want an ongoing “always watching this branch” RC rather than a one-time release attempt.

When it turns on by itself: if your chosen release branch matches the production branch for every selected project — the classic CI shape, with no separate release branch. If any differ, it defaults off, but you can still enable it as long as every selected project has a release strategy and branch configured.

How project relationships affect this

Which projects you pick, and the relationships you mapped between them, determine what Early actually analyzes — a project with unmapped dependencies can only be checked in isolation.

Next

Run your first analysis against this release candidate.