Releasing security patches

.. Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more contributor license agreements. See the NOTICE file distributed with this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership. The ASF licenses this file to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

.. http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

.. Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

Releasing security patches

Airflow providers are released independently from Airflow itself and the information about vulnerabilities is published separately. You can upgrade providers independently from Airflow itself, following the instructions found in :doc:apache-airflow:installation/installing-from-pypi.

When we release Provider version, the development is always done from the main branch where we prepare the next version. The provider uses strict SemVer <https://semver.org>_ versioning policy. Depending on the scope of the change, Provider will get ''MAJOR'' version upgrade when there are breaking changes, MINOR version upgrade when there are new features or PATCHLEVEL version upgrade when there are only bug fixes (including security bugfixes) - and this is the only version that receives security fixes by default, so you should upgrade to latest version of the provider if you want to receive all released security fixes.

The only exception to that rule is when we have a critical security fix and good reason to provide an out-of-band release for the provider, in which case stakeholders in the provider might decide to cherry-pick and prepare a branch for an older version of the provider following the mixed governance model <https://github.com/apache/airflow/blob/main/PROVIDERS.rst#mixed-governance-model>_ and requires interested parties to cherry-pick and test the fixes.