Reusing existing draft release no longer works in GH org

[bkimminich]

I just recently moved https://bkimminich/juice-shop into https://juice-shop/juice-shop and noticed a behavior change of my release flow https://github.com/juice-shop/juice-shop/blob/master/.github/workflows/release.yml#L49 as follows:

Precondition

I manually create a draft release named vX.Y.Z where I store all release notes over time until the release gets published.

✅ Before (https://bkimminich/juice-shop)

When pushing tag vX.Y.Z the action would use the existing release and attach build artifacts to it.

❌ After (https://juice-shop/juice-shop)

When pushing tag vX.Y.Z the action will ignore the existing release and create a new release also named vX.Y.Z where it attaches all build artifacts. I can use a workaround of copy-pasting my release notes over to the newly created release and delete the old one, but it'd be nice to get rid of this glitch.

---

I am at a loss where this behavior might come from. Is it maybe something with lacking permissions of default GITHUB_TOKEN when working in a GitHub org instead of a personal account? Or could this be an actual bug in the action?

[softprops]

I’ll have to take a closer look but when specifying a draft an attempt is made to first resolve an existing draft with the same name before creating a new one

https://github.com/softprops/action-gh-release/blob/58fa4b7a8863f6beaf115a49196308842b8b0f06/src/github.ts#L209

[cfcurtis]

I'm having a similar issue - in my case I'm building two assets in parallel jobs (one for mac, one for windows) and then uploading to create a new release. Oddly enough this behaved as expected 2 days ago, creating a single draft release with two assets attached, and re-running the action resulted in updating the asset on the existing release.

Today it is creating two separate releases with the same tag, each with a single asset, and every time I run the action a new draft release with the same tag is created. Did something change on GitHub's end? I can't see anything different in your action or in my workflow.

[matchai]

We've been hit by the same issue over on https://github.com/starship/starship. We have a release first be created as a draft by https://github.com/googleapis/release-please, generate our build artifacts, then would use action-gh-release to upload the artifacts and publish the draft with draft = false. Instead of updating the existing release, a new non-draft one is created.

[The-Compiler]

I had a similar problem, and ended up using actions/github-script to find and update the release. I originally tried:

const tag = "v${{ needs.prepare.outputs.version }}";
const release = await github.rest.repos.getReleaseByTag({
  owner: context.repo.owner,
  repo: context.repo.repo,
  tag: tag,
})
await github.rest.repos.updateRelease({
  owner: context.repo.owner,
  repo: context.repo.repo,
  release_id: release.data.id,
  draft: false,
  body: "Check the [changelog](https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/doc/changelog.asciidoc) for changes in this release."
})

But ended up getting a 404 for finding the release, even though the tag was correct. That might well be the same underlying issue which also causes this action to create a new one, I suppose?

In the end, I instead used the release ID from this action directly (heavily cut down, untested, but might be a good starting point?):

name: Release

on:
  ...
jobs:
  prepare:
    ...
    outputs:
      ...
      release_id: ${{ steps.create-release.outputs.id }}
    steps:
      - name: Create GitHub draft release
        id: create-release
        uses: softprops/action-gh-release@v1
        with:
          tag_name: v${{ steps.bump.outputs.version }}
          draft: true
          body: "*Release artifacts for this release are currently being uploaded...*"
  ...
  finalize:
    ...
    needs: [prepare, ...]
    steps:
      - name: Publish final release
        uses: actions/github-script@v6
        with:
          script: |
            await github.rest.repos.updateRelease({
              owner: context.repo.owner,
              repo: context.repo.repo,
              release_id: "${{ needs.prepare.outputs.release_id }}",
              draft: false,
              body: "Check the [changelog](https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/blob/master/doc/changelog.asciidoc) for changes in this release."
            })
  ...