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Riot Documentation

Release Cycle

RIOT has a new release every three months, named after the month it was feature frozen in. For example, 2025.01 was feature frozen in January 2025. Feature freeze marks the branch-off point of the <YYYY.MM>-branch, where <YYYY.MM> is the release name. Any new features merged into master after that point will be part of the next release. This branch, referred to as the release branch, is the stable branch of RIOT.

After feature freeze, the current release candidate in the release branch undergoes extensive testing. For more information on the release testing, see our release specifications. Bug fixes made during this testing period are backported from master to the release branch, and new release candidates may be created when certain milestones are reached. Once all major bugs are fixed, the new RIOT release is signed off by the appointed release manager, typically within 2 weeks after the feature freeze. For more details and instructions for release managers, see the managing a release guide.

RIOT follows a rolling release cycle, meaning support and bug fixes are only provided for the most current release.

Download a Release

You can download the source code of our releases via GitHub as a ZIP file or tarball. Alternatively, you can check them out if you’ve already cloned RIOT with Git:

Terminal window
git pull --tags
git checkout <YYYY.MM>

Point Releases and Hot Fixes

For major bug fixes, we may provide a point release YYYY.MM.N, resulting in a new ZIP file or tarball on the release page. However, minor bug fixes are only pushed to the release branch. You can fetch that via Git using:

Terminal window
git clone -b <YYYY.MM>-branch https://github.com/RIOT-OS/RIOT

or if you have RIOT already cloned:

Terminal window
git pull origin <YYYY.MM>-branch:<YYYY.MM>-branch
git checkout <YYYY.MM>-branch