The primary distribution channel for workerd right now is through npm. We use a (mostly) automatic CI setup to release and publish both workerd and workers-types.
workerd and workers-types follow the same versioning system. The major version is currently 1 for workerd and 4 for workers-types. The minor version for both is the compatibility date specified in compatibility-date.capnp (the latest compatibility date that the workerd release will support).
This is pretty simple, and completely automatic—every time the compatibility date in compatibility-date.capnp changes, a new release is generated, along with the built binaries for linux-64, darwin-64 and windows-64. This is governed by the release.yml GitHub Action. Since this only generates binaries for linux-64, darwin-64 and windows-64, binaries for darwin-arm64 and linux-arm64 need to be built manually on local machines. These can be generated from a local checkout of workerd using the build-release.sh script. This must be run on an Apple Silicon machine, and will generate binaries for the latest release on GitHub. The generated GitHub release should be edited, with the built binaries uploaded as extra assets (named workerd-darwin-arm64 and workerd-linux-arm64 respectively).
Since the "Release" stage requires manual upload of binaries, this "Publish" stage requires a manual run of a GitHub Action—the Publish to NPM action. This action has a workflow_dispatch trigger that can be activated from within the GitHub UI, and takes two parameters; the patch version, and whether this release is a prerelease. If it is a prerelease, the published NPM version will be tagged with beta, and have a version number starting with 0.. Otherwise, the published NPM version will be tagged latest, and have a version number starting with 1..
This also requires a manual run of a GitHub Action—the Publish types to NPM action. This action has a workflow_dispatch trigger that can be activated from within the GitHub UI, and takes two parameters; the patch version, and whether this is a prerelease. If it is a prerelease, the published NPM version will be tagged with beta, and have a version number starting with 0.. Otherwise, the published NPM version will be tagged latest, and have a version number starting with 4..