Publish NPM Version

Publish next npm version

Audience

Maintainers of the unified Prisma CLI with permission to push branches and open PRs in prisma/prisma-cli. The skill runs locally, never as a GitHub Action — a locally opened PR triggers CI normally, which is the point of a reviewable release PR.

Background reading

Read docs/oss/versioning.md first. It covers the source-of-truth model (root package.json version), the lockstep guarantee (@prisma/compute excluded by ruling), the Prisma 8 RC line, the dist-tag convention, and the release procedure this skill is one step of. One note specific to this repo: the lockstep excludes @prisma/compute by operator ruling.

Pre-flight

No requirement to be on main or have a clean tree — all work happens in a fresh worktree off origin/main. Confirm git fetch origin main succeeds; if not, stop and surface the issue.

Procedure

1. Fetch and determine the target version.

   git fetch origin main
   CURRENT=$(git show origin/main:package.json | node -e 'process.stdout.write(JSON.parse(require("fs").readFileSync(0,"utf8")).version)')
   NEXT=$(node -e "import('./scripts/determine-version-utils.ts').then(m => process.stdout.write(m.computeNextReleaseVersion(process.argv[1])))" "$CURRENT")
   echo "$CURRENT → $NEXT"
   

   $NEXT names the branch and PR; step 3 recomputes the authoritative value inside the fresh worktree and the two must agree.

2. Create a fresh worktree off origin/main.

   git worktree add -b "release/$NEXT" "../release-$NEXT" origin/main
   cd "../release-$NEXT"
   

3. Bump. pnpm install --frozen-lockfile --ignore-scripts if the worktree has no node_modules, then pnpm bump-version. Confirm the version it wrote matches $NEXT; on mismatch the worktree's value is authoritative — remove worktree and branch, restart from step 1.

4. Check the lockfile moved. pnpm bump-version refreshes pnpm-lock.yaml itself, because internal deps are pinned workspace:<version> and a stale lockfile fails every later frozen install with ERR_PNPM_OUTDATED_LOCKFILE. If it is missing from the diff, stop — the bump did not finish.

5. Sanity-check the diff. Only package.json files and pnpm-lock.yaml; manifests change exactly version + workspace:<old> → workspace:<new>; the excluded packages/compute/package.json is untouched.

6. Commit everything in one commit:

   chore(release): bump to <version>
   

7. Push the branch to origin.

8. Open the PR with gh pr create. Use the title:

   Bump to version <version>
   

   Body: previous → new version; link docs/oss/versioning.md; note that merging this PR ships the release — the squashed push to main changes the root version with the release marker, the Publish to npm workflow publishes @prisma/cli-engine then @prisma/cli under latest, and a GitHub Release (pre-release on the RC line) is created with generated notes. This repo has no committed release-notes file gate; review the generated notes on the Release after merge.

9. Stop and report the PR URL and the worktree path. Do not merge — the merge is the human gate that triggers the publish. The maintainer removes the worktree after merge (git worktree remove ../release-<version>).

Idempotency

pnpm bump-version reads the root version from git show HEAD:package.json, so re-running in the same worktree cannot double-bump. The skill as a whole is not idempotent: step 2 fails if the branch/worktree already exist — remove them (git worktree remove ../release-$NEXT; git branch -D release/$NEXT) or continue inside the existing worktree from step 3. Do not stack bumps.

Out of scope

• Merging the PR (human gate; merging is the publish trigger).
• Patch releases. On the RC line a fix is just the next rc.N.
• Beta tags — hand-cut via workflow_dispatch of Publish to npm with the beta dist-tag; this skill always advances the release version.
• @prisma/compute — excluded from the lockstep by operator ruling (2026-08-10); it versions and publishes independently (publish-compute.yml) pending extraction to another repo.