Nightly release

Ship a patch every night whenever there are unreleased commits — without writing a release: trailer on every fix.

How it works

putitoutthere doesn't own the cron; your GitHub Actions workflow does. The workflow fires on a schedule, invokes putitoutthere plan, and publishes whatever the plan contains:

• If files changed inside a package's paths since the last tag, the package cascades and ships at patch.
• If nothing changed, the plan is empty and the workflow is a no-op.

No trailer is required. Trailers remain available for explicit minor/major bumps or skip on the rare merge you don't want released — they just aren't load-bearing for nightly patching.

Workflow

name: Nightly release

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 9 * * *'   # 09:00 UTC daily
  workflow_dispatch: {}    # manual "ship now" button

permissions:
  id-token: write          # OIDC for crates.io / PyPI / npm
  contents: write          # tag push + GitHub Release

jobs:
  plan:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    outputs:
      matrix: ${{ steps.plan.outputs.matrix }}
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with: { fetch-depth: 0 }   # full history so last-tag lookup works
      - id: plan
        uses: thekevinscott/putitoutthere@v0
        with:
          command: plan

  build:
    needs: plan
    if: needs.plan.outputs.matrix != ''
    # … your existing build job, fanning out over the matrix …

  publish:
    needs: [plan, build]
    if: needs.plan.outputs.matrix != ''
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with: { fetch-depth: 0 }
      - uses: actions/download-artifact@v4
        with: { path: artifacts, pattern: '*', merge-multiple: true }
      - uses: thekevinscott/putitoutthere@v0
        with:
          command: publish

The matrix != '' guard skips build and publish on quiet nights — plan emits an empty matrix when there's nothing to release.

Testing a change to this workflow

A PR that only touches .github/workflows/release.yml won't cascade any package and won't cut a release — which is correct, but it means the PR that updates the release pipeline is the one PR that can't self-test on merge. See testing your release workflow for the three tiers of validation (plan --json locally, workflow_dispatch + dry_run, and a deliberate test commit).

Combining with trailer-driven bumps

Nightly cron and trailer-driven releases compose — they're the same pipeline, different triggers. Push a commit with release: minor and the next cron (or a manual workflow_dispatch) bumps minor across cascaded packages. Most commits won't carry a trailer, and those ship at patch on the next cron.