Release Candidate
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A Release Candidate (RC) is a version of your software that's basically done and you think is ready — but you're doing one final check before officially calling it a release. Like a dress rehearsal before opening night. If nothing goes wrong, this IS the release.
Real Talk
A Release Candidate is a build considered potentially ready for release, subject to final testing. It's denoted as v2.0.0-rc.1 in semantic versioning. If no critical bugs are found during the RC phase, it is promoted to the final release, often without any code changes.
When You'll Hear This
"Deploy the RC to staging and let QA hammer it for a week." / "This is rc.2 — we had to fix one crash from rc.1."
Related Terms
Release
A release is an official versioned snapshot of your software that you hand to the world.
Semantic Versioning (SemVer)
Semantic versioning uses three numbers — MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH — where each number means something. PATCH (1.0.1) = bug fix. MINOR (1.1.
Staging
Staging is a fake version of your real app that looks and acts exactly like production but has zero real users.