Release Lookout

The bot that drives Artsy's mobile release cadence. It reminds the Release Captain of the tasks due on a given day, and cuts the release candidate itself on code-freeze day.

The captain-facing runbook is Release Captain Tasks 🔐.

Meta

• Slack App Link: https://api.slack.com/apps/A04BAKXR83S
• Point People: @gkartalis

What it does

A single CircleCI job (send_reminder) runs at 10:00 UTC, Monday–Friday (.circleci/config.yml) and executes two scripts in order — yarn send-reminder, then yarn create-rc. Each one decides for itself whether today is its day and no-ops otherwise, so most runs do nothing.

We release on a two-week cadence: code freeze on the Friday of week 1, submission on the Tuesday of week 2.

When	What happens	Script
Thu, week 1	Release-notes call-out in Slack, tagging every team handle (no captain mention)	send-reminder
Fri, week 1	Reminder to set up Recent Changes QA + request Applause, naming this cycle's platform and test suite from the 4-release rotation	send-reminder
Fri, week 1	Cuts rc-v<version> from eigen's main, opens the chore(release): v<version> RC PR labelled "Do not merge" with the generated changelog, posts the code-freeze message	create-rc
Wed, week 2	Feedback-form nudge	send-reminder
Thu, week 2	DMs the incoming captain the runbook link and sets the channel topic to Captain: <@next>	send-reminder

Opening the RC PR is what triggers the rest of the release in eigen — rc-release-automation.yml pushes the RC branch to beta-ios/beta-android, builds the four betas, then creates the Mobile App QA document in Notion. Nothing about the betas or the QA doc lives in this repo.

Cadence maths

isFirstWeekOfCadence in src/constants.ts is anchored to ROTATION_EPOCH rather than to ISO week parity, so year boundaries (week 52→1, 53→1) don't flip the cadence. Everything aligns to startOf('week') so Mon–Wed aren't miscounted against the Thursday epoch.

Who's the captain

Orbit The rotation of the captains lives in orbit https://orbit.artsy.net/rotations/cms7oon4o0000s011fwzr9s1n, which gives us overrides and shift swaps.

You can also find the captain's name as a topic of the #practice-mobile channel.

How to develop

• Run yarn setup:artsy to get your .env file set up (yarn setup:artsy:update! to refresh it — do this if GITHUB_TOKEN has expired, the usual cause of create-rc failing locally).
• Run yarn install to install deps.
• Run yarn send-reminder to send today's reminder, yarn create-rc to cut the release candidate.
• Run yarn test for the unit tests, which cover the cadence maths, the Applause rotation and the changelog generation.

Both scripts gate on the real date, so running them off-cadence just prints why they skipped. To exercise the message paths, pass a DateTime to sendReleaseReminder(now) / use src/test-send.ts.

Testing

By default messages go to the #bot-testing channel — add yourself there to see them.

Uncommenting the manual workflow

.circleci/config.yml has a commented-out release_cadence_manual workflow that runs the job on every push. Handy for debugging on a branch; don't merge it uncommented.

Shifting the schedule (bank holidays)

Set these in the CircleCI project's environment variables (no code change or deploy needed):

Variable	Meaning
RELEASE_DAY_OFFSET	Whole days to shift. -1 runs the schedule a day earlier (Thursday behaves as Friday), 1 a day later. Default 0.
RELEASE_DAY_OFFSET_UNTIL	Optional ISO date (inclusive). After it the offset is ignored, so it can't linger.

Example: Friday 2026-10-09 is a bank holiday, so the Friday tasks (RC creation, applause reminder) should run on Thursday the 8th, and Thursday's tasks on Wednesday the 7th. Set:

RELEASE_DAY_OFFSET=-1
RELEASE_DAY_OFFSET_UNTIL=2026-10-08

The offset applies through the end of Thursday the 8th. From Friday the 9th on it is ignored automatically, so there is nothing to unset afterwards (you can still delete the variables to tidy up). Without RELEASE_DAY_OFFSET_UNTIL, the offset stays active until you remove it.

The offset applies to both reminders and RC creation. Orbit's captain lookup still uses the real date.

Weekends and week boundaries

• The cron only runs Monday–Friday, so tasks shifted onto a Saturday or Sunday never run (e.g. 1 would move Friday's tasks to Saturday and skip them). Use offsets that keep every task on a weekday.
• An offset that moves the schedule date across a Sunday/Monday boundary also changes which cadence week it counts as. Offsets of 1–2 days around a normal Thursday/Friday release don't cross it.
• The captain-handover message still says the rotation starts "tomorrow", while Orbit's actual switch keeps its real date.