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Skillsrelease-recovery

release-recovery

Deployment & operations

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Updated 10-16 00:31

About this skill

Release Recovery

Repair the desync a failed release leaves behind: packages are live on npm, but the repository still has the old versions.

npm publishes are irreversible, so npm is the source of truth. Recovery always means moving the repository forward to match the registry — never the other way round.

The default operation is read-only. Do not create branches, commits or pull requests until the user explicitly approves a proposed plan.

Scope

Recovery restores version bumps and changelogs. It does not recreate release git tags:

  • A recovery commit is not the commit the release was built from, so tags created against it would point at the wrong history — worse than having no tag.
  • A single release spans dozens of packages (a v9 release touches ~90), so bulk tag creation is noisy and effectively unreviewable.
  • Tags are not load-bearing for consumers; npm is what they install from.

Missing tags can still be reported for awareness with --check-tags on the diagnostic, but they are informational. If tags are genuinely needed for a specific release, create them deliberately as a separate, explicitly-approved task.

When to use

  • A release pipeline failed after the "Publishing" step (typically a git push 403/auth failure).
  • A release was published to npm deliberately without pushing (a forced release that skips the git push).

Defaults

Argument Default Purpose
pipeline-url none Failed ADO run, used only for context and reporting
--ref the release branch on the remote Git ref whose versions are compared against npm
--remote remote pointing at microsoft/fluentui Used for fetching and pushing

Resolve --remote by inspecting git remote -v for the one pointing at microsoft/fluentui. It is often upstream in a fork checkout, so never assume origin.

Workflow

Step 1 — Establish context

Confirm tooling and record the starting ref so it can be restored later:

gh auth status
git remote -v
git status --porcelain

Record START_REF (git symbolic-ref --quiet --short HEAD || git rev-parse HEAD).

If the working tree has uncommitted changes, stop and ask the user to deal with them. Recovery rewrites package.json, changelog and lockfile content and must not mix with unrelated edits.

Fetch the release branch so the comparison is not made against a stale checkout:

git fetch "$REMOTE" master

Step 2 — Read the failed pipeline (optional)

If a pipeline URL was supplied, use it for context only. Parse the organization, project and build id from a URL of the form https://dev.azure.com/<org>/<project>/_build/results?buildId=<id>.

az pipelines runs show --org "https://dev.azure.com/$ORG" --project "$PROJECT" --id "$BUILD_ID"

Useful signals in the log:

  • Publishing - <pkg>@<version> followed by Published! — packages that reached npm.
  • Something went wrong with publishing! Manually update these package and versions: — beachball's own list of what needs recovering.
  • remote: ... forbids access via a personal access tokens (classic) or The requested URL returned error: 403 — the push failed on auth, which is the usual cause.

Treat all of this as corroboration only. If az is not authenticated or the run has been purged, say so and continue: the diagnosis in Step 3 does not depend on it.

Step 3 — Diagnose (read-only)

Run the sync check against the up-to-date release branch:

node -r ./scripts/ts-node/src/register ./scripts/executors/src/check-release-sync.ts \
  --remote "$REMOTE" --ref "$REMOTE/master"

Add --json when the output needs parsing.

Always pass --ref pointing at the remote release branch. Comparing the working tree of a stale checkout reports every package released since as a false desync.

The check classifies each public package:

Status Meaning Action
in-sync repo and npm agree none
npm-ahead published, but the repo never recorded the bump recover versions
repo-ahead repo is newer than npm's latest (unreleased work, prerelease tags) none — benign
unpublished never released none

Only npm-ahead requires recovery.

Step 4 — Present the plan and get approval

## Release recovery plan

- Pipeline: <url or "not supplied">
- Remote: upstream
- Compared against: upstream/master
- Version desync: 2 package(s)

### Version desync

| Package         | Repo    | npm     |
| --------------- | ------- | ------- |
| @fluentui/react | 8.125.6 | 8.125.7 |

### Proposed actions

1. Regenerate bumps + changelogs from the pending change files
2. Verify the result matches npm exactly
3. Add `type: none` change files so the PR passes `beachball check`
4. Open a recovery PR

Release tags are not recreated - see the skill's Scope section.

Stop here if there is no npm-ahead drift. Otherwise ask the user to approve or cancel. Never treat invoking the skill as approval to mutate anything.

Step 5 — Recover versions

Skip this step when nothing is npm-ahead.

Create a branch from the current release branch:

git switch -c "release-recovery/$(date -u +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)" "$REMOTE/master"
yarn install

Regenerate the release locally. The change files consumed by the failed run are still in the repo (their deletion was never committed), so beachball reproduces the same bumps and changelogs:

yarn beachball bump --config scripts/beachball/src/<release>.config.js

Pick the config matching the failed pipeline:

Release Config Pipeline
v8 scripts/beachball/src/release-v8.config.js azure-pipelines.release.yml
v9 (vNext) scripts/beachball/src/release-vNext.config.js azure-pipelines.release-vnext.yml
web-components scripts/beachball/src/release-web-components.config.js azure-pipelines.release.web-components.yml
headless scripts/beachball/src/release-headless.config.js azure-pipelines.release.headless.yml
tools scripts/beachball/src/release-tools.config.js azure-pipelines.release.tools.yml

beachball bump only writes files — it does not commit, tag or push. Tagging and pushing live exclusively in beachball's bumpAndPush, which is reachable only from the publish command. Verified empirically against 3.0.0-alpha.7: a full bump run changed 123 files and created 0 tags, 0 commits and 0 branches.

It does not run the precommit hook either (that also only runs on the push path), so apply the same fixups a real release would. Keep this in sync with hooks.precommit in scripts/beachball/src/shared.config.ts:

yarn nx g @fluentui/workspace-plugin:dependency-mismatch
yarn nx g @fluentui/workspace-plugin:normalize-package-dependencies
yarn install --mode=update-lockfile

Expect bump to consume more change files than it bumps packages. type: "none" change files are deleted without producing a version bump — that is normal, and matches what a real release does.

Verify before committing. Re-run the sync check against the working tree:

node -r ./scripts/ts-node/src/register ./scripts/executors/src/check-release-sync.ts --remote "$REMOTE"

Every previously npm-ahead package must now be in-sync. If any version overshoots npm, extra change files landed after the failed release, so a plain replay is not correct — stop, report the mismatch, and let the user decide. Never hand-edit versions to force a match.

Satisfy beachball check. A real release pushes straight to master and never faces PR validation, but a recovery PR does. The change-files job in .github/workflows/check-packages.yml runs beachball check, sees the bumped package.json files as changed packages, and fails with ERROR: Change files are needed! — because the replay just consumed every change file that covered them.

Generate type: none change files to cover exactly those packages:

yarn beachball change --type none --no-commit \
  --message "release recovery: versions already published to npm by the failed pipeline"
yarn beachball check

--type none is the correct type: the next release consumes these files without bumping a version or writing a CHANGELOG.md entry. They leave only a "none" entry in CHANGELOG.json, which is a useful audit trail of the recovery. Verified empirically on 3.0.0-alpha.7: a follow-up bump with 38 such files produced 0 package.json and 0 CHANGELOG.md changes.

Do not skip this because a past recovery PR passed without it. PR #36364 did, but only by coincidence — unrelated change files had accumulated for the same packages in the meantime, and beachball reported Your local repository already has change files for these packages. That is not a property you can rely on.

Commit and open a PR. Stage explicitly rather than with git add -A, so unrelated untracked files in the user's tree are not swept into a release commit:

git add -u          # bumps, changelogs, lockfile, consumed change files
git add change/     # the new type:none change files
git commit -m "release: applying package updates (manual recovery)"
git push "$PUSH_REMOTE" HEAD
gh pr create --repo microsoft/fluentui --base master \
  --title "release: applying package updates (manual recovery)" \
  --body-file "$PR_BODY_FILE"

Let the precommit git hook run — do not pass --no-verify. The manual fixups above replace beachball's precommit hook, not the repository's.

The PR body must state which pipeline failed and that the packages are already on npm.

Step 6 — Restore and report

git switch "$START_REF"
yarn install

The reinstall matters: the recovery branch rewrote yarn.lock, so the restored branch is left with out-of-date node_modules otherwise.

Report:

  • Packages recovered, with repo and npm versions.
  • Recovery PR URL.
  • Anything skipped, with the reason.
  • A reminder to fix the underlying cause — usually rotating the GitHub PAT in the Github and NPM secrets variable group — since the next release fails identically otherwise.

Guardrails

  • Always diagnose and obtain approval before mutating anything.
  • Never unpublish, deprecate or re-publish an npm package to "fix" a mismatch. npm is the source of truth; the repository moves to match it.
  • Never hand-edit versions to force agreement with npm. Regenerate with beachball so changelogs and dependency ranges stay consistent, and stop if the result disagrees.
  • Never commit directly to master; always go through a PR.
  • Never bypass PR validation to land a recovery. Make beachball check pass with type: none change files rather than merging with an admin override or weakening the change-files job.
  • Never git add -A. The user's tree may hold unrelated untracked work, and a release commit must not carry it.
  • Never create or push release tags as part of recovery. They would point at a commit the release was not built from, and a single release spans dozens of packages.
  • Never assume origin points at microsoft/fluentui — resolve the remote explicitly.
  • Never trust a diagnosis made against a stale checkout; always compare against the fetched release branch.
  • Never request or print a GitHub or npm token.
  • Do not proceed when the working tree has uncommitted changes.