Release rollbacks

[laughedelic]

Hi! I have a general question: can Auto handle failed release and rollback changes from the steps before failure?

And I have a concrete situation: I'm trying to use Auto in a Scala (sbt) project. Here is my .autorc.yml configuration:

plugins:
  - git-tag
  - released
  - - exec
    - publish: "sbt publish"
shipit:
  noChangelog: true

On CI I run auto shipit on merges to the main branch.

At first, I misconfigured sbt and publishing step failed. But it could fail for any other reason (server error, etc.). Unfortunately, the git tagging step happens before sbt publish is run, and it pushes the tag to the remote.

So after the failure, I have a tag on the remote, but no release and no published artifacts. If I fix the issue or just rerun, it will bump the version again and skip all changes from the failed release.

---

Is it possible to configure git-tag/exec plugins to do it in this order:

1. bump the version
2. create git tag locally (no push)
3. run sbt publish (or whatever custom exec/publish step)
4. push the tag
5. do the rest of the release process

So that if the process fails on step 3 (publishing artifacts), there are no changes on the remote, and it's safe to rerun or push another change (e.g. a fix) and have everything released as if there was no failed release.

Another approach to this would be to have a rollback step and delete the pushed tag if the release failed (thus my general question in the beginning). I think it's more complicated and the right order of steps would cover most situations (IMO artifacts publishing is the most "fragile" step).

[laughedelic]

As always, after writing the question I sort of realized the answer 😅 I tried changing the order of plugins in the config:

plugins:
  - - exec
    - publish: "sbt publish"
  - git-tag
...

And now it runs git-tag/version, exec/publish, git-tag/publish, etc. And I tested that if the exec/publish fails, the tag is not published.
I also noticed that there is a afterVersion hook that I could use in exec, but I think it's not the right place for publishing artifacts.

While my immediate case is solved, I still have a couple of questions:

Is the order of plugins an undocumented feature? Are there any better ways to achieve the result? + the general question about rollbacks 🙂

[hipstersmoothie]

I guess the order isn't really mentioned in the docs outright. If you find a place where it makes sense to explains that feel free to make a or to the docs.

As for whether this is the best way, short of writing a plugin yes. Is sbt equivalent to npm for Scala? If so I'd def encourage you to contribute a plugin for the platform.

[hipstersmoothie]

As for automatics rollbacks:

That seems kind of hard. Depending on the platform you can't unpublish something or publish over it. So it might be hard to come up with a generic enough solution that also has nice DX

[laughedelic]

Thanks for answering the questions! I'm looking into writing an sbt plugin.

[laughedelic]

Here we go: #1962 😇

[gitfool]

Not an answer, but continuing the discussion re:

If I fix the issue or just rerun, it will bump the version again and skip all changes from the failed release.

I've seen this happen too, when the auto release is necessarily a completely separate step in the workflow before the actual build step runs and subsequently fails.

@hipstersmoothie I would expect that if nothing source code related changes, then when re-running the workflow the auto release step should do nothing at all - certainly not bump the version and pile on yet another tag and release - leaving just the build step to do its thing; i.e. auto release should be idempotent. This is especially important when the build step might run into unrelated transient errors.