Automated Branch Management for Weekly Releases in Meituan's Mobile Client

The article describes how Meituan's client team handles rapid weekly releases for its transportation business line by automating the management of multiple repositories and release branches.

Background

Internet products now iterate at high frequency, requiring teams to adopt a "small steps, fast run" approach. Meituan's client platform therefore introduced a weekly release strategy, which brings three main benefits: faster validation of product ideas, more flexible rollout cadence, and earlier bug fixes.

The previous release cadence was a four‑week cycle (three weeks of development + one‑half week of testing). Missed schedules could delay the next release by at least 20 days. The new weekly cadence removes fixed testing windows, allowing any completed feature to hop on the next "release train".

Pain Points for Business‑side Developers

Moving from a serial, monthly release model to a parallel, weekly model introduced several challenges:

Development cycles are no longer fixed; many features and versions run concurrently, increasing branch‑management complexity.

The transportation business line spans many repositories (16 Git repos across Android, iOS, RN, etc.), making branch creation, merging, and synchronization labor‑intensive.

Frequent changes in shared foundation libraries require the ability to release them on a weekly basis as well.

These issues raise the risk of branch conflicts, missed merges, and code safety problems.

Solution: Weekly Release Branch Management

The team introduced a new branching model:

Discard the long‑lived Develop branch.

Create a Release/x.x.x branch from Stage for each weekly version.

Use Stage as the mainline ("mother") branch that continuously integrates all released features.

After a release passes testing, merge it back into Stage. All active feature branches then sync with the updated Stage to keep the next release consistent.

Automation is achieved with Jenkins jobs that:

Batch‑create Release branches across all repositories.

Trigger notifications when Stage changes.

Run pre‑merge checks and block packaging if a branch is out‑of‑sync.

Generate pull‑requests for bulk merges before a release.

Key workflow steps are illustrated in the following diagrams:

Key Points of the Branch Process

Six critical checkpoints are enforced: branch creation, merge to mainline, mainline change notification, merge of mainline changes, synchronization detection, and unsynced‑branch interception. The process also covers multi‑repo coordination and hot‑fix handling.

The tooling stack includes Git + Atlassian Stash for repository management, Jenkins for build and automation, and an internal communication tool ("Elephant") for notifications.

Future Outlook

After ten successful mini‑releases with no production incidents, the team aims to further increase automation: automatically generate branches based on version numbers, resolve simple merge conflicts automatically, and eventually support faster release cadences such as bi‑weekly or daily releases.

Author

Wang Kun, Meituan client development engineer, responsible for the transportation client architecture and version management since 2016.