iptvnator/docs/architecture/release-pipeline.md

Release Pipeline

How a release is assembled, from the note an author writes during an ordinary PR to the draft GitHub release a human publishes.

The agent-facing entry points are the release-notes skill (writing notes) and the release-cut skill (running a release). This document is the contract they reference: the asset set, the ordering constraints, and the reasons behind them. The skills stay short on purpose; the detail lives here.

Two phases

During ordinary PRs every user-visible change adds one .changes/<area>-<slug>.md note, written while the context is fresh. CI's "Release note gate" enforces it. Format and field table: .changes/README.md.

At release time tools/release/build-release-notes.mjs fans those notes out into every surface, then deletes them. Nothing derives the version — it is chosen deliberately by bumping package.json.

Surfaces built from one set of notes

Surface	Command	Writes
CHANGELOG.md section	release:notes:changelog	the file
Website blog scaffold	release:notes:blog	apps/website/src/content/blog/<vX-Y>-release-notes.mdx
GitHub release body	(tag build)	via extract-changelog-section.mjs --public
Telegram announcement	release:notes:telegram	stdout
Reddit announcement	release:notes:reddit	stdout
Highlight cards	release:cards:generate	dist/release-highlight-cards/v<version>/
Screenshots	release:screenshots	apps/website/public/blog/<vX-Y>/screenshots/

Run the two stdout commands as pnpm --silent run … whenever the output is redirected to a file or a clipboard. Without it pnpm prints its lifecycle banner (> iptvnator@0.23.0 release:notes:telegram …) to the same stdout, and the saved post starts with two lines of build noise.

The ordering constraint that matters

build-release-notes.mjs --consume is the destructive boundary: it deletes the note files. The CHANGELOG.md keeps every entry's text, but highlight: lives only in the note files and is not recoverable afterwards. Every surface that reads it — both announcements and the cards — must therefore run before --consume. The cards additionally need release:screenshots to have already published its frames, since they composite them.

highlight: — what leads a release

An optional note field naming one of the release's two or three headline changes. It is rejected on type: internal, and capped at 60 characters to keep it headline-sized — roughly what the hero card fits on one line.

The cap is an authoring guideline, not a rendering guarantee: character count is not width. Card text wraps by estimated rendered width (estimateTextWidth), because 34 W at font-size 52 measures ~1948px where 1072px are available — a character-capped line still ran off the canvas.

The SVG names DM Sans, but nothing guarantees it is installed: every host resolves the fallback chain differently, and the same line measures 0.389 em per r here against about 0.49 em elsewhere. No estimate can be both tight and correct across environments, so the factors sit well above the widest observation — locally the model over-estimates every sample by at least 1.25×.

That estimate is deliberately inverted: narrow characters are enumerated and everything else is assumed wide. Enumerating the wide ones instead cannot converge — successive review passes each found another under-estimated glyph (W, then CJK and emoji, then the ae ligature) — and a glyph the list misses crops the card while every unit test still passes. With the wide default the estimate can only run high, and running high costs an early line break nobody sees. tools/release/highlight-cards.test.mjs renders each sample through sharp and asserts the estimate never falls below the measured ink width, which is the guard against that whole class of bug.

Text that cannot fit even after wrapping is ellipsized, and each emitted line carries an SVG textLength clamp when the estimate still says it would overflow.

Highlights drive three behaviors:

• Telegram leads with them and folds everything else into a "…plus N more" counter. A type: breaking note is never folded, highlighted or not: announcing a breaking change as "fixes and improvements" is worse than a longer post. If the breaking changes alone cannot fit the 4096-character limit, the render fails with an actionable error rather than dropping one.
• Reddit gives each one an ## Highlights subsection, with the remaining changes grouped below. Its suggested title names as many highlights as Reddit's separate 300-character title cap allows and counts the rest — five highlights at the validated 60-character maximum already overshoot it while the body stays nowhere near its own limit. The body is bounded the same way at Reddit's 40,000-character post limit — this repository's accumulated notes already render ~37,000 — dropping from the tail of the grouped list, which is ordered breaking → feature → fix → perf so the least consequential go first. A breaking change is never dropped there either.
• The blog scaffold gives each highlight a row in the opening "What changed" table and its own ## section ahead of everything else, instead of emitting TODO headline (<area>). Shape below.

Prose fields keep #. parseFrontmatterLine strips trailing # comment text only from closed-vocabulary fields (type, area, issues, screenshot), whose values can never contain one — highlight: Sources #N chip is a headline.

Internal-only releases

A release whose notes are all type: internal is a legal shape: the authored GitHub body is empty and GitHub's generated commit list carries the detail. Both announcement formats then print an explanation on stderr, leave stdout empty, and exit 0 — the same shape extract-changelog-section.mjs --public already uses for its empty public body.

Blog scaffold shape

renderBlogScaffold (tools/release/release-notes-blog.mjs) emits the shape the published posts end up in, so the editor starts from the form rather than from the inventory — the v0.23 post shipped as the raw type-grouped list with area prefixes and had to be restructured after publication. In order: narrative intro (TODO) → ReleaseMeta → ## What changed (a ChangeTable with one row per highlight; the theme is the default area label, the impact a TODO) → the "About the screenshots" alert when any note names a screenshot → one ## section per highlight or screenshot note, with a StatusPill matching the note type → ## Breaking changes → the remaining features folded into themed ## sections → ## Performance → ## Everything else, holding every remaining fix under a Spoiler grouped by theme → the before-updating alert → ## Thanks → ## Download link cards (release tag, full notes, the compare link when a previous version is known, all releases).

Themes come from BLOG_THEMES: a conventional-commit area says nothing to a reader ("matching", "window-controls", "electron-backend"), so notes fold into reader-facing headings ("Stalker portals", "Live TV, EPG and M3U"). An unmapped area lands in "Other changes" rather than failing; add it to the map when it recurs. Two defaults are deliberately dumb: every non-highlighted fix goes into the spoiler, and every bullet keeps its full note body. Promoting the fixes users will notice, compressing bullets to one line and writing the bold lead-ins is the editorial pass, and the scaffold marks where with TODO. Only the components the post actually uses are imported, so an MDX build never fails on an unused import.

Highlight cards

tools/release/highlight-cards.mjs plans and lays out; tools/release/generate-highlight-cards.mjs renders through sharp. Output is 1200×630 (Open Graph), matching the website palette in apps/website/tailwind.config.mjs.

• One card per highlight, plus a release hero card written as both hero.png and the hero.jpg the blog scaffold's frontmatter references.
• A highlight naming a screenshot: gets a framed screenshot strip along the bottom; one without gets a typographic layout instead. The frame is opaque and painted after the text, so the body's line budget is derived from the space left above it, never assumed — a fixed count sliced the last line in half whenever the headline wrapped to two lines.
• Card filenames come from the note filename, never the screenshot slug: two highlights may legitimately share one manifest shot, and naming cards after it made the second overwrite the first.

Screenshots come only from the capture script running against the mock servers. Never publish one taken from a real playlist or account — streams, logos and metadata are copyrighted, and credentials must never reach a published image.

The same script also produces the evergreen screenshots of the website guides. Manifest shots that carry "group": "guides" are skipped by a release run and captured only with pnpm release:screenshots --group guides, which publishes into apps/website/public/blog/guides/screenshots/ instead of a release folder (outputDirectoryFor in screenshot-guards.mjs). Guide shots go through every guard a release shot does; the add-playlist dialog shots fill the form with the mock's fictional marketing credentials and use a labeled hand-out for the Auto-detect method rather than a get.php?username=… link, because G4 rejects any URL carrying query credentials. Shots that walk into a Stalker portal (open-stalker-live) make the run start the stalker-mock-server on port 3210 and seed its marketing-demo portal as a third source, which is why they are never part of a release run. That scenario's MAC, 00:1A:79:00:00:07, is the one MAC-shaped string G4 accepts (FICTIONAL_STALKER_MAC); every other MAC still fails the frame. The scenario's live channels and logos come from @iptvnator/shared/marketing-fixtures, served by the mock itself, so no third-party image is ever requested.

Output lands in dist/release-highlight-cards/v<version>/, outside version control — keyed by the exact version, because 0.24.0 and 0.24.1 share a blog post but not a card set. A run first removes the cards a previous run left in that directory (only files matching what this tool writes), so a renamed or dropped highlight cannot leave a stale image waiting to be published. Copying a card into the website tree is a deliberate manual act.

A release with no highlight: notes is not an error: the hero card is still rendered and the run exits 0. An internal-only release has nothing public to put on a card and exits 0, first clearing any cards an earlier run of the same version left behind. An empty .changes/ directory is a different thing and does fail: it almost always means this step ran after --consume, and reporting that as "internal-only" would hide the one ordering mistake the pipeline is built to prevent.

Draft verification

The v* tag build creates a draft GitHub release. pnpm run release:verify:draft (tools/release/verify-draft-release.mjs) is the gate that runs before a human publishes it. It is strictly read-only: it never publishes, edits or deletes.

1. Find the run. gh run list reports what is indexed right now — its --limit caps how many runs come back, it does not wait for one to appear, and a tag pushed seconds ago routinely is not indexed yet. The verifier polls (10 attempts, 6 s apart) before concluding the tag was never pushed.
2. Wait for it. An in-progress run is streamed through gh run watch --exit-status. A completed run with a non-success conclusion fails immediately. A missing gh binary and an interrupted watch are reported as themselves, not as a build failure — spawnSync surfaces both as status: null.
3. Check the release. Draft status, the authored body, and the complete asset set below.

The authored-body check compares the release body against the local CHANGELOG.md section, not against emptiness. The tag workflow appends GitHub's generated notes to the authored text (FULL_BODY in .github/workflows/build-and-make.yaml), so the body is never empty and an emptiness test could never fail. An internal-only release, whose public section is legitimately empty, is reported as such rather than warned about.

An already-published release still gets its asset report — auditing one after the fact is useful — but never a success exit. Reporting a pass for a pre-publication gate after publication would claim a boundary already crossed.

Required asset set

27 assets, verified against a real complete matrix build. When the build matrix in .github/workflows/build-and-make.yaml gains or loses a target, update requiredAssetRules() in the same PR.

Platform	Assets
macOS	-mac-{x64,arm64}.{dmg,zip} + a .blockmap for each (8)
Windows	-windows-x64-setup.exe + .blockmap (2)
DEB	-linux-{amd64,arm64,armv7l}.deb (3)
AppImage	-linux-{x86_64,arm64,armv7l}.AppImage (3)
Snap	-linux-{amd64,armhf}.snap (2)
RPM	-linux-x86_64.rpm (1)
Flatpak	-linux-x86_64.flatpak (1)
Pacman	-linux-x64.pacman or -linux-x86_64.pkg.tar.* (1)
Updater metadata	latest.yml, latest-mac.yml, latest-linux.yml, latest-linux-arm.yml, latest-linux-arm64.yml (5)
Source compliance	linux-frame-copy-runtime-sources.tar.xz (1)

Electron Builder has shipped both pacman artifact shapes, so either satisfies that rule. Rules compare plain strings rather than a regex built from the version — requiredAssetRules() is exported, and escaping an interpolated value correctly would be a standing trap.

An asset no rule claims is reported as a NOTE: and does not fail the run: a new build target should surface for a human to notice, not block a release until the rules catch up.

AppImage external-manager metadata

electron-builder.json scopes X-AppImage-Name, X-AppImage-Homepage and X-AppImage-UpdateURL to appImage.desktop.entry. The source URL is the canonical GitHub repository. AppManager 3.8.0 reads these URL fields and can discover GitHub releases and download complete AppImages. Its architecture selection recognizes the existing x86_64, arm64 and armv7l asset names. Other Linux package formats do not inherit these AppImage-specific fields. extraMetadata.desktopName=iptvnator preserves the existing window class and desktop filename. Do not reintroduce a shared linux.desktop.entry object: electron-builder 26.15.7's target merge mutates nested defaults, which would leak the AppImage URL fields into Snap in the same portable packaging pass.

Electron Builder generates X-AppImage-Version from appInfo.buildVersion; do not hardcode it in the desktop entry. X-AppImage-Arch is intentionally omitted: a single runner-wide value would mislabel this multi-architecture target. Version, preserved desktop defaults and format isolation are checked through the installed builder in electron-package-identity.test.mjs.

This metadata enables AppManager's full-download workflow. It does not embed AppImageUpdate .upd_info, generate .zsync, or change Electron's existing latest-linux*.yml and embedded blockmap update path. The required release asset set remains unchanged. Gear Lever/AppImageUpdate delta compatibility is not implied. An older AppImage needs a first manual or built-in update, or a manually configured AppManager source, to acquire these fields. Use one updater at a time for a manager-owned installation.

References: AppImage desktop keys, AppManager desktop parser, AppManager updater.

Nightly channel

Every push to master of 4gray/iptvnator is also a nightly. The same build-and-make.yaml run that builds the matrix publishes its artifacts as a prerelease of 4gray/iptvnator-nightly instead of the rolling test-master draft: a draft is invisible to anyone without write access and to electron-updater, while a published prerelease is what the desktop app's Nightly update channel installs. PR builds keep their test-pr-<n> drafts; tag builds are unaffected.

Version. Each build job rewrites the package.json version before the frontend and backend builds and before electron-builder reads it (tools/release/nightly-version.mjs --apply):

0.23.0  →  0.23.1-nightly.20260915.1234
           └ next patch ┘ └ commit date ┘ └ run number ┘

• Greater than the released 0.23.0, so a stable user who switches channels is offered it; smaller than 0.23.1 and 0.24.0, so the next stable release is offered to nightly users on either channel.
• The run number only grows, so nightlies order correctly within a day.
• electron-builder derives the updater channel files from the prerelease tag: nightly-mac.yml, nightly.yml, nightly-linux.yml. The artifact upload globs and the macOS metadata merge accept both names.
• The root package.json is an Nx sharedGlobals input, so the rewritten version reaches the web and electron-backend bundles (which embed it) instead of a cache hit built from the released version.
• The base is the version in package.json. The patch is bumped only when v<base> already exists on origin. A release cut commits the bump before (or together with) its tag, and while that tag is missing the base is the UPCOMING release, so the nightly keeps its patch (0.23.1 untagged → 0.23.1-nightly.<date>.<run>): still above every earlier nightly, still below the imminent 0.23.1, so nightly users are offered that release instead of skipping it.
• The version is computed once, in the leading nightly-version job, and handed to every build job as --version — a tag pushed while the matrix runs cannot give one run two different versions. The release job reads the same output to name the tag v<version>.

Publication (steps at the end of the create-release job):

1. NIGHTLY_RELEASE_TOKEN — a fine-grained PAT with Contents: read/write on 4gray/iptvnator-nightly — is required. Without it the run only warns; GITHUB_TOKEN cannot write to another repository. The nightly repository needs one commit on its default branch, because gh release create creates the release tag there.
2. The notes list the master commits since the previous nightly. That nightly's source commit is read back from the <!-- iptvnator-commit: … --> marker its own notes carry, then compare on the main repository (with GITHUB_TOKEN) lists the range. A missing marker or a rewritten history only drops the list.
3. The release is created as a draft, assets are uploaded, then it is published in one edit, so electron-updater never sees a release whose channel file is still missing. Missing nightly-mac.yml, nightly.yml or nightly-linux.yml fails the step instead. A published release is never deleted by a re-run: re-running after a successful publish is a no-op, and only a draft left behind by a failed run is replaced.
4. The release job is serialized per ref, but two master runs can finish out of order. electron-updater takes the newest feed entry, so a nightly older than the newest published one is dropped rather than published.
5. Only the newest NIGHTLY_KEEP_RELEASES (20) nightlies are kept; older ones are deleted together with their tags.

In the app. Settings.updateChannel (stable / nightly, default stable) is a normal renderer setting mirrored into the main-process config by SETTINGS_UPDATE (APP_UPDATE_CHANNEL), because the startup check runs before the renderer exists. AppUpdateService re-points electron-updater on every check (app-update-feed.ts): the GitHub feed URL of the channel's repository, allowPrerelease only for nightly, the channel name (nightly, or the explicit latest for stable — the setter refuses null once set), and allowDowngrade = false reset afterwards, since assigning a channel silently enables downgrades and the constructor enables prereleases for any prerelease build. Release notes and the manual-install fallback (Linux without AppImage) read the channel's release list; notes for a nightly version always come from the nightly repository, so a nightly build on the stable channel still shows its own notes.

Switching is forward-only on purpose: a nightly build stays installed until a newer stable release exists, because a downgrade could land on a release that does not understand the database schema a nightly migration already applied. Nightly users therefore accept that everything merged into master is de facto shipped — a migration on master can only be followed by another migration, never reworked.

After verification

Publishing the GitHub release is manual. That publication automatically verifies its Snap assets and uploads them to edge; installed-Snap smoke and candidate/stable promotion remain manual (see tools/packaging/validate-snap-release-boundary.mjs). Keep the blog post a draft during artifact verification, then publish it in a follow-up commit and verify the website deployment.

Validation

pnpm run release:notes:validate   # every note parses and satisfies the schema
pnpm nx run release-tools:test    # the tooling's own unit tests
pnpm nx run release-tools:lint