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DEPLOY_BRANCH is pinned to a deleted copilot branch, so no push to main has ever deployed #2018

Description

@dmccoystephenson

Summary

The repository variable DEPLOY_BRANCH is set to copilot/add-github-actions-workflow, a branch that no longer exists. .github/workflows/deploy.yml gates its job on:

if: github.ref_name == (vars.DEPLOY_BRANCH || 'main') || workflow_dispatch

so every push to main evaluates that condition as false and the deploy job is skipped. The last five recorded runs of deploy.yml — including two on main — all show skipped.

Impact

No merge to main has ever deployed to the omcsi instance through this workflow. The workflow reports as present and green, which is why the gap is invisible from the Actions tab: a skipped job is not a failed one.

Why this is being filed rather than fixed

Correcting the variable to main would mean the next merge auto-deploys to the live server, carrying every undeployed change since the variable was set. That is a deployment decision, not a repository-hygiene one, and it belongs to whoever operates that server. The same defect was found and corrected in Dans-Plugins/Activity-Tracker (its issue #95), where flipping the variable did exactly that — so the consequence here is known rather than speculative.

Suggested resolution

Either:

  1. Set DEPLOY_BRANCH to main after a controlled workflow_dispatch run has confirmed the deploy path still works against the current server, or
  2. Remove the variable entirely so the workflow falls back to its documented 'main' default, again after a manual dispatch.

Whichever is chosen, a follow-up worth considering is failing loudly when DEPLOY_BRANCH names a branch that does not exist, so a stale pin cannot masquerade as a healthy skip.

Found while verifying that merging #2016 into main could not trigger an unintended production deploy.


drafted by Claude on behalf of Daniel Stephenson

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