Release Devbox

Release the Devbox CLI

scripts/release.ts owns every mechanical step and the order they run in. Your job is the judgment: read what's shipping, recommend a version, write the title and notes, and help the user pick how to release.

Two entry points, both of which walk the whole pipeline:

Read-only helpers: devbox run release-changes and devbox run release-status.

1. Look at what would ship

devbox run release-changes

This prints the commits since the last release grouped by kind (breaking / features / fixes / other), the recommended version, and whether flake.nix needs bumping. Read it before saying anything about the release.

The recommendation follows devbox's own history: it's pre-1.0, so breaking changes take a minor bump (0.17.5 → 0.18.0) and everything else takes a patch bump — 0.17.4 shipped new features as a patch. Say what the script recommends and why, but sanity-check it against the actual diff. A release that removes whole subsystems deserves a minor bump even if nobody wrote feat!:.

2. Ask how they want to release

Present the three options and let the user choose — don't assume:

1. Draft first (devbox run draft-release) — builds everything and stops at a draft. Right when the notes need review, or when the release is being coordinated with an announcement. This is the safe default.
2. Publish directly (devbox run publish-release) — same pipeline, then takes it live. Right for routine patch releases.
3. Publish an existing draft (devbox run publish-release) — if a draft is already sitting there, the command lists it and offers to finish it. Check with devbox run release-status first.

3. Write the title and notes

The script prompts for these in $EDITOR when a human drives it. When you're driving, write them yourself and pass them as flags — that's the point of doing this through an agent.

Get the raw material from GitHub's generated changelog:

gh api repos/jetify-com/devbox/releases/generate-notes \
  -f tag_name=<version> -f previous_tag_name=<prev> -f target_commitish=main --jq '.body'

That's a dump of PR titles. Rewrite it into user-facing notes in the house style that 0.17.4 established and 0.18.0 is the cleanest example of:

## What's Changed

### 💥 Breaking Changes

* **What was removed** — what users must do instead, by @author ([#1234](https://github.com/jetify-com/devbox/pull/1234))

### ✨ New Features

* **Short bold lead-in** — what changed and why a user cares, by @author ([#1234](...))

### 🐛 Bug Fixes

* Plain one-liners for small fixes, by @author ([#1234](...)).
* **Group related fixes** — combine several PRs into one bullet when they share
  a root cause ([#1234](...)) and ([#1235](...)), by @author.

### 🧹 Maintenance

* Dependency bumps, CI work, docs. Group aggressively; nobody reads this section
  line by line.

## New Contributors
* @newperson made their first contribution in https://github.com/jetify-com/devbox/pull/1234

**Full Changelog**: https://github.com/jetify-com/devbox/compare/<prev>...<version>

Rules that matter:

• Lead with impact, not the commit subject. "Shells in paths with spaces now work" beats "quote the shellrc source guard".
• Breaking changes go first and say what to do instead. For a release that removes features, this is the whole story — say plainly what's gone and what replaces it, or that nothing does.
• Only include sections with content. Drop the ones that are empty.
• Keep attribution. Every bullet ends with by @author and its PR link.
• Use plain backticks for code. Do not escape them as \`. Nothing re-interprets the body — goreleaser's Discord announcer is enabled: false in .goreleaser.yaml — and Markdown renders \` as a literal backtick rather than opening a code span. That's why 0.17.4's published notes are full of stray backslashes. The script unescapes any that slip through, but don't write them.

For the title, default to the bare version (0.18.0). A short theme suffix is fine when the release has one: 0.18.0 — Devbox goes fully local.

Show the user the title and full notes and get explicit sign-off before running anything. That's the last checkpoint before it goes live.

4. Run it

Save the notes to .context/release-notes-<version>.md, then:

node scripts/release.ts --draft \
  --version 0.18.0 \
  --title "0.18.0" \
  --notes-file .context/release-notes-0.18.0.md \
  --yes

Swap --draft for --publish to go live. Notes on driving it as an agent:

• --yes is required when you run it. Its confirmation prompts need a TTY, and your shell doesn't have one — without --yes it stops with "this step needs an answer but stdin is not a terminal". Only pass it after the user has signed off; it's skipping their checkpoint, not adding one.
• It blocks for ~15 minutes waiting on cli-release. Run it in the background and check back, rather than letting the call time out.
• It's resumable. Every step is idempotent, so if it fails partway, fix the cause and re-run the same command — it picks up where it left off rather than duplicating work.
• --skip-cli-tests exists but is a loaded gun. It only skips the check that the latest cli-tests run on main is green; cli-release still runs the whole suite and fails the build if it isn't. Use it when the check is wrong (a run still in progress you've already inspected, a flake you've confirmed), not to push past a genuinely red main.

If flake.nix needs bumping, the script offers to do the whole thing: it rewrites lastTag, refreshes vendor-hash and flake.lock, commits to bump-flake-<version>, pushes, opens the PR, and puts you back on main with a clean tree. Then it stops — that bump has to be reviewed and merged before the tag is pushed, otherwise the tagged commit ships the wrong version string. Get it merged and re-run the same command; preflight pulls the new main and carries on. A re-run while the PR is still open stops immediately with its URL rather than opening a second one.

Preflight is picky about the checkout on purpose, since the tag lands on whatever HEAD is. A main that's merely behind origin/main and clean fast-forwards itself; anything else (wrong branch, dirty tree, local-only commits) stops with the command that fixes it.

Why the order is what it is

Don't work around these; they're why the script exists.

• Draft before tag. goreleaser runs with release.disable and only builds dist/; cli-release uploads that to the release for the tag, looking it up by tag with gh. With no draft it creates one from GitHub's generated notes — usable, but not the notes you wrote. (goreleaser used to do the upload itself, but it matched drafts by title, so any release with a real title got a silent duplicate draft with bare-commit-SHA notes. That's what shipped as the 0.17.5 release notes, and what stalled 0.18.0.)
• Publish after the build. docker-image-release fires on the release event and immediately downloads the release tarballs to bake into the image. Publishing before cli-release uploads them fails the Docker build. That's exactly what happened on 0.17.3 and 0.17.5, both published from the GitHub UI, which creates the tag and publishes in one action.
• Flake bump before the cli-tests check. The bump has to merge into main, which re-runs cli-tests there — so a result read before the bump is about a commit that won't be released. Settling the bump first also means a red main doesn't hide the fact that a bump PR is needed.
• Publish from local credentials, not CI. GitHub doesn't trigger workflows from events raised by GITHUB_TOKEN. That's why CI-created edge releases never trigger docker-image-release, and why publishing can't just be a CI step.

If something is stuck

devbox run release-status reports the tag, draft, asset count, cli-release result and the current flake.nix version in one shot.

Known breakage

Check these are still true before blaming the release itself:

• main was red from 2026-07-02 until #2951. The macOS zig-hello-world example test failed because build.zig used the pre-Zig-0.12 API while devbox.lock pinned zig 0.11.0; the upgrade to zig 0.16 fixed it. A red main blocks all releases — cli-release gates on the test suite — so check the current state rather than assuming either way.
• flake.nix drifts. It sat at 0.17.3 through both the 0.17.4 and 0.17.5 releases. The script catches this now and opens the bump PR for you.