Glossary
Release Candidate (RC)
A release candidate is a pre-release build that is considered feature complete and intended to become the final release unless a serious defect is found during testing.
A release candidate, abbreviated RC, sits at the end of the pre-release pipeline, after alpha and beta stages. By the RC stage the feature set is frozen, and the goal is to verify stability rather than add functionality. If testing surfaces no blocking issues, the same build is promoted to the stable release.
Under semantic versioning, release candidates are labeled with a suffix after a hyphen, such as v3.0.0-rc.1 and v3.0.0-rc.2 for successive candidates. These pre-release versions have lower precedence than the matching stable version, so tooling treats v3.0.0-rc.1 as coming before v3.0.0 and will not install it as the stable release by default.
Publishing release candidates lets teams gather real-world feedback and catch regressions before committing to a final version. The accompanying release notes usually flag the build as not yet production-ready and invite testers to report problems.