Bug: create-plugin + release.yml The engine "node" is incompatible with this module. Expected version ">=22". Got "20.18.1"

[L2D2Grafana]

What happened?

Pushed a git tag and the release.yml failed with the following error.

release.yml job

Run /home/runner/work/_actions/grafana/plugin-actions/release/build-plugin/pm.sh install
Running 'install' with yarn...
yarn install v1.22.22
[1/5] Validating package.json...
error adaptive-traces@0.0.1-0: The engine "node" is incompatible with this module. Expected version ">=22". Got "20.18.1"
error Found incompatible module.
info Visit https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/install for documentation about this command.

Reproduce

• scaffold app with create-plugin latest
• run npm version prerelease
• git push origin v0.0.1-0 to trigger the job
• release.yml fails

Fix

Downgrade engine in package.json

 "engines": {
    "node": ">=20.0.0"
  },

create plugin also specifies to use grafana/plugin-actions/build-plugin@release however this does not create a latest package or give output data.

updated to grafana/plugin-actions/build-plugin@main and added latest creation with

      - id: 'create-latest'
        run: cp ${{ steps.build-release.outputs.archive }} ${{ steps.metadata.outputs.archive }}

It's confusing whether or not we should use build-plugin@main vs build-plugin@release internally

[tolzhabayev]

@L2D2Grafana you are right - we should be using main, updating the tooling here grafana/plugin-tools#1399

I did not quite understand the goal of adding create-latest can you share more of why you added it?

[L2D2Grafana]

@tolzhabayev most in-house grafana plugins build a version number and also latest. Here's what is looks like in Google Cloud Storage artifacts. And here is a github action from csp-app creating latest example

• Side note: It seemed like in the old drone pipelines you could auto update dev with your latest or main branch, which seems pretty handy. Everyone seems to be re-creating those on individual teams right now.

[tolzhabayev]

Ah ok got it - so basically additionally to normal version zip file you also generate a -latest.zip file so that you can always point to the same url instead of changing the version every time.

re: side note
we finally have a github actions pipeline that we maintain and that can be reused by anyone internally https://enghub.grafana-ops.net/docs/default/component/grafana-plugins-platform/plugins-ci-github-actions/010-plugins-ci-github-actions/

It can also not publish to the catalog by specifying gcs-only:true and also copy it as latest (https://github.com/grafana/plugin-ci-workflows/blob/e4f12d42fb8d6d315941a4dffbd0d03b5331ae33/.github/workflows/ci.yml#L324-L341)

For dev workflows we usually recommend:

• Publishing / testing of PRs on dev like this https://enghub.grafana-ops.net/docs/default/component/grafana-plugins-platform/plugins-ci-github-actions/010-plugins-ci-github-actions/#testing-a-pr-in-grafana-devcom
• Once the pipeline rolls to production - it should always backfill all stages - dev, ops and then prod so that the stages are either ahead but never behind prod.

The upside of using it is - not having to worry about secrets (we use OIDC/workflow identity federation), buckets and anything else you otherwise have to worry about and we take the maintenance on us.

So - happy to help if you want to use it - maybe we can add a couple of more cases / parameters that we yet did not think about.