From 9a7c306468adecec1590975dfefe131002272f8c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Tane Morgan <464864+tanem@users.noreply.github.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2026 05:36:40 +1200
Subject: [PATCH] fix: exit 0 when there is nothing to release

The weekly release workflow was failing with a stack trace whenever no
PRs had merged since the last tag, which is a normal outcome, not an
error. release() now resolves 'nothing-to-release' instead of
throwing, so the CLI prints a message and exits 0 in that case while
still failing loudly for genuine validation errors (unlabelled or
multi-labelled PRs).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
---
 README.md            | 2 +-
 src/cli.ts           | 5 ++++-
 src/release.ts       | 6 ++++--
 test/release.test.ts | 4 ++--
 4 files changed, 11 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-)

diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index cb311ea9..79074a51 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -83,7 +83,7 @@ import { changelog } from 'tanem-scripts';
 
 ### release()
 
-Returns a `Promise` that will be resolved once the release script completes. If an error occurs during execution, the `Promise` is rejected with an `Error` object.
+Returns a `Promise` that resolves with `'released'` once the release script completes, or `'nothing-to-release'` if no pull requests have merged since the last published tag. If an error occurs during execution, the `Promise` is rejected with an `Error` object.
 
 **Example**
 
diff --git a/src/cli.ts b/src/cli.ts
index 53e086f8..9c8e26d1 100644
--- a/src/cli.ts
+++ b/src/cli.ts
@@ -71,7 +71,10 @@ program
   .description('publishes a package to npm')
   .action(async () => {
     try {
-      await release();
+      const result = await release();
+      if (result === 'nothing-to-release') {
+        process.stdout.write('Nothing to release\n');
+      }
     } catch (error) {
       console.error(error);
       process.exit(1);
diff --git a/src/release.ts b/src/release.ts
index ef6bed63..12eee00a 100755
--- a/src/release.ts
+++ b/src/release.ts
@@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ import { get as getData } from './data';
 
 const execaOptions: execa.Options = { stdio: 'inherit' };
 
-const release = async (): Promise<void> => {
+const release = async (): Promise<'released' | 'nothing-to-release'> => {
   const { pulls, tags } = await getData();
 
   const latestTag = tags[tags.length - 1];
@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ const release = async (): Promise<void> => {
     : pulls;
 
   if (pullsToRelease.length === 0) {
-    throw new Error('Nothing to release');
+    return 'nothing-to-release';
   }
 
   const labelsToRelease = [
@@ -101,6 +101,8 @@ const release = async (): Promise<void> => {
     ['publish', '--provenance', '--access', 'public'],
     execaOptions,
   );
+
+  return 'released';
 };
 
 export default release;
diff --git a/test/release.test.ts b/test/release.test.ts
index 78b6d0e0..ec5ce71c 100644
--- a/test/release.test.ts
+++ b/test/release.test.ts
@@ -75,7 +75,7 @@ describe('release validation', () => {
     );
   });
 
-  test('throws if nothing to release', async () => {
+  test("returns 'nothing-to-release' if there is nothing to release", async () => {
     const mockDataNoNewPulls = {
       ...mockDataWithLabels,
       tags: [
@@ -88,6 +88,6 @@ describe('release validation', () => {
     jest
       .spyOn(data, 'get')
       .mockResolvedValue(mockDataNoNewPulls as unknown as data.Data);
-    await expect(release()).rejects.toThrow('Nothing to release');
+    await expect(release()).resolves.toBe('nothing-to-release');
   });
 });