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Release Rehearsal

A release rehearsal is a dry-run of the Publication Runbook: it executes every safe pre-flight check and verifies prerequisites for the unsafe steps without publishing, pushing, tagging, or submitting anything.

It is how the project confirms a release is genuinely ready before any irreversible operation runs.

:::info Source The rehearsal results live in docs/RELEASE-REHEARSAL-v0.1.0.md in the repository. This page summarises that document. :::

What a rehearsal checks​

A rehearsal walks the runbook's §2 pre-flight top to bottom:

  • Toolchain — PHP, Composer, Node, npm, GitHub CLI versions.
  • P0-A — clean working tree, on main, synced with origin.
  • P0-B — CI green on the exact release commit.
  • P0-C — the 10 per-package release repos exist and are empty.
  • P0-D — no v0.1.0 tag exists yet on any release repo or the monorepo.
  • npm identity — npm whoami, npm org ls @ausus, and 2FA readiness.
  • Artifacts — composer validate on all manifests, composer archive on every package, and npm pack --dry-run for the renderer.
  • Local gates — scripts/ci.sh, scripts/clean-room.sh, scripts/integration-http.sh.

Every registry-mutating command is replaced with a read-only equivalent.

Determination​

A rehearsal ends with one of two determinations:

  • HOLD — one or more P0 gates failed; publication must not proceed.
  • READY TO PUBLISH — all P0 gates passed; the operator may begin the runbook's phased procedure.

The v0.1.0 rehearsal was run iteratively. Early runs returned HOLD while release infrastructure was still being set up (the runbook branch needed merging, the GitHub CLI needed authenticating, the 10 release repos needed creating, the npm @ausus org needed creating). Once that infrastructure was in place, the rehearsal returned READY TO PUBLISH with all 14 gates green.

Why rehearse​

The rehearsal exists because the alternative — discovering a missing release repo or an unauthenticated CLI mid-publication — risks leaving the ecosystem in a half-published, partially-irreversible state. A rehearsal moves every discoverable failure to before the first irreversible operation.

Re-verification rule​

A rehearsal verifies the runbook against one specific commit. If any new commit lands on main afterwards, the pre-flight — especially P0-A and P0-B — must be re-run against the new HEAD before publishing.