vibey-gh

Release automation for a GitHub repository: provenance fingerprints, derived version bumps, exact-head AI review and repair, a merge train, dual-channel releases, comprehensive documentation maintenance, and post-release branch realignment.

No dependencies. Everything is stdlib. This runs in every CI job of every repository that adopts it, so a dependency it grows is a dependency all of them grow.

Why vibey-gh

GitHub can run tests, but a dependable open-source delivery system needs much more than a green test job. It must intake branches, keep documentation honest, review outside work, repair actionable failures without weakening gates, merge through protected branches, derive versions, publish to the correct registry, create releases and packages, deploy discoverable documentation, preserve provenance, and recover safely when a trusted post-merge job fails. vibey-gh installs that complete event-driven path as one portable, auditable contract.

Use it when you want develop to be the integration channel, main to be production, and every transition between them to be reproducible and policy checked.

Requirements

• Python 3.11 or newer, Git, and the GitHub CLI (gh).
• A GitHub repository with Actions enabled and Pages configured for Actions deployments.
• ANTHROPIC_API_KEY for AI review, repair, conflict resolution, and documentation upkeep.
• AUTOMERGE_TOKEN when the default Actions token cannot merge or manage repository settings.
• PyPI and TestPyPI trusted-publishing environments when Python publication is enabled.

The installed Python runtime has no third-party dependencies. Workflow-only tools are pinned to immutable action revisions and run in GitHub-hosted jobs.

Quick start

pip install vibey-gh
vibey-gh install

Commit the generated hooks, workflows, assets, and configuration; configure the required secrets and publishing environments; then verify the complete installation:

vibey-gh check --ci
git status --short

Push a topic branch. Branch intake creates a draft PR, exact-head scans decide when it is stable, and the event chain handles review, repair, merge, promotion, publication, docs, tagging, GitHub Release creation, and repository-profile reconciliation.

Architecture

Configuration value objects describe desired state; deterministic evaluators judge versions, PRs, documentation, and interface parity; CLI adapters call those policies; and rendered workflows provide the privileged GitHub edge. Managed templates are the source of truth, and dogfood tests require this repository's installed copies to match them. Every decision is tied to an exact commit SHA, and stale workflow events are ignored. See Architecture, Workflows, and Threat model.

Security model

Privileged jobs treat PR content, logs, model output, and repository instructions as untrusted. They inspect or edit constrained files but never execute contributor-controlled package managers, tests, builds, or scripts while write credentials are present. Ordinary PR CI validates resulting commits. Managed automation never sends a deletion refspec for main or develop, and automatic branch deletion stays disabled because develop is itself the head of production promotion PRs. See SECURITY.md.

Commands

Run vibey-gh --help and read docs/cli.md for the full reference.

install writes the git hooks and workflow files into your repository and points core.hooksPath at them. A hook you already have is moved aside to <name>.local and chained, never discarded — adopting this should not silently drop checks somebody thought were important.

What it does

Provenance, enforced in two places

Every code change carries a fingerprint. Source files get a header comment; every commit gets a trailer. The trailer is what makes the rule total — a change to a Markdown file or a JSON manifest still arrives as a commit, and the commit is fingerprinted even when the file cannot be.

vibey-gh check                 # are the hooks installed and the fingerprints intact?
vibey-gh check --apply         # add the missing file headers
vibey-gh check --commits main..HEAD    # and every commit trailer in a range

The pre-push hook refuses the push if either half is missing, to any branch, local or remote. git push --no-verify still works, because a hook that cannot be bypassed in an emergency gets uninstalled instead; CI applies the same rule server-side, so skipping it locally defers the failure rather than avoiding it.

Versions derived, not remembered

vibey-gh version --since origin/main --explain     # what should this release be?
vibey-gh version --since origin/main --apply       # write it to every version file
vibey-gh version --dev "$GITHUB_RUN_NUMBER"        # <release>.dev<n> for a TestPyPI build

none is a legitimate answer. This has to be automatic: a PyPI upload with skip-existing turns an unbumped release into a green run that publishes nothing, silently, with no warning anywhere. A human-maintained version is a silent-failure generator.

Version files may be Python (__version__ = "..."), JSON (a version key, at the top level or under metadata), or TOML (the [project] table — and only that table, because pyproject.toml has others carrying a version key and bumping the wrong one is worse than not bumping).

The merge train

vibey-gh merge-train --dry-run
vibey-gh merge-train --method squash

The normal path is event-driven: the PR-automation gate dispatches vibey-gh merge-train --pr NUMBER as soon as the exact current head is green. The weekly and manual modes remain recovery backstops. A ready PR is open, current with its target, conflict-free, green, free of requested changes, and carries a successful exact-head PR automation / gate when an outside-author review is required.

Outside authors receive a fresh structured Claude review after scans pass. Findings feed the same bounded repair loop as failed scans. Forks are never mutated with privileged credentials; when a fork needs edits, automation preserves its exact head in a linked repository-owned replacement PR.

PR review and repair automation

branch-intake.yml opens exactly one draft PR when a new same-repository topic branch is first pushed. It ignores the integration branch, release branch, and automation-owned fork repair branches. Later pushes reuse the existing PR. Once the configured scans for the exact draft head are complete and green, PR automation marks it ready and immediately continues through review, repair, gating, and the merge train. Pending, failing, stale, conflicting, closed, and fork draft heads are no-ops; they are never promoted prematurely.

pr-automation.yml reacts to configured scan-workflow completions, re-reads the entire current-head check rollup, and publishes an explicit check run on that exact SHA. It waits for pending scans, separates cancelled infrastructure from actionable failures, and allows at most three repair commits per contributor lineage. A new contributor commit starts a new lineage; bot repair pushes do not reset the counter.

Conflicting same-repository PRs enter a bounded conflict-resolution job instead of failing permanently. The job materializes Git's exact unresolved path set without executing repository code, gives the constrained agent read/search/edit access only, rejects edits outside that set, rechecks the head SHA, and publishes one ordinary non-force resolution commit. Fork conflicts continue through the repository-owned replacement-PR path. Conflict attempts share the three-attempt repair budget, so an ambiguous merge cannot loop forever.

Review and repair use the immutable-pinned Claude Code Action with selected vibey-skills. The privileged jobs may inspect source and CI logs but may not execute contributor package managers, tests, builds, scripts, or binaries. Ordinary PR CI validates every repair push. The agent has no Git mutation tool: one trusted publisher may push a non-empty source (HEAD:refs/heads/<exact-pr-branch>) only to the exact PR branch. This deliberately permits forward updates to develop or main when either is the PR head, while making a Git deletion refspec (:branch) structurally impossible. Managed merges automatically update develop and main, but no managed command uses --delete, --delete-branch, an empty-source refspec, or a branch-deletion API. Repositories must configure ANTHROPIC_API_KEY; AUTOMERGE_TOKEN is required where the default Actions token cannot push or merge through the repository ruleset. Installation does not create either secret.

vibey-gh pr-automation evaluate --pr 123 --head-sha HEAD_SHA
vibey-gh pr-automation ready-draft --pr 123 --head-sha HEAD_SHA
vibey-gh pr-automation mirror-fork --pr 123
vibey-gh merge-train --pr 123

The promotion

vibey-gh promote --dry-run
vibey-gh promote

Moves the integration branch to the release branch, which is what publishes. Three things it gets right that a hand-written workflow usually does not:

• It compares by content, not by commit count. The release branch is rebase-merged, so its commits are rewritten copies with different SHAs; the integration branch always looks "ahead" even when the trees are identical. A diff is the only honest test.
• It derives the version before opening anything. An upload with skip-existing turns an unbumped promotion into a green run that publishes nothing, silently.
• It hands the PR to the same event gate as every other change. promote no longer holds a runner open with gh pr checks --watch; scans, automated review, and the exact-head merge train finish the promotion asynchronously. --wait retains the legacy synchronous mode for recovery.

Realignment

vibey-gh realign

When the release branch is rebase-merged its commits are rewritten copies with new SHAs, so the integration branch's tip is never an ancestor of it and a fast-forward is impossible — yet a ruleset with a strict up-to-date policy treats it as behind, which blocks the next promotion.

The guard is tree equality, not ancestry: this runs only when a diff between the two branches is empty, so it converges two identical contents onto one history and cannot discard work. If the integration branch has anything the release branch does not, it is left alone and says so.

Configuration

[pr_automation]
enabled = true
scan_workflows = ["CI", "Provenance", "CodeQL", "Docs", "API drift (Cloud Agents OpenAPI)"]
ignored_checks = ["PR automation / gate", "gate", "Merge train / merge"]
max_repair_attempts = 3
model = "claude-sonnet-5"
review_untrusted_authors = true
repair_untrusted_authors = true
replace_fork_prs = true
retain_schedule_backstop = true

[github_release]
enabled = true
tag_prefix = "v"
generate_notes = true

[repository_profile]
enabled = true
description = "A configurable repository description"
topics = ["automation", "documentation", "github-actions"]
has_issues = true
has_projects = true
has_wiki = false
has_discussions = true
allow_squash_merge = true
allow_merge_commit = false
allow_rebase_merge = true
allow_auto_merge = true
delete_branch_on_merge = false
web_commit_signoff_required = true
vulnerability_alerts = true
automated_security_fixes = true

[documentation]
enabled = true
ai_maintenance = true
model = "claude-sonnet-5"
production_label = "Production"
preview_label = "Preview"
production_indexing = true
preview_indexing = false
generate_robots = true
generate_sitemap_index = true
generate_llms_txt = true
generate_llms_full_txt = true
generate_json_ld = true

Comprehensive documentation and AI maintenance

The Docs workflow enforces the complete FOSS and multi-agent documentation contract on every push and pull request. A scheduled or manually dispatched privileged maintenance job then performs a repository-wide semantic refresh: it reads source, tests, configuration, packaging, workflows, and releases; creates missing documentation; repairs stale claims; and opens a guarded documentation PR. It never executes repository code in the privileged job, never commits application changes, and never mutates a permanent branch directly.

The required suite includes README, changelog, license, conduct, contribution, security, support, architecture, operations, testing, release, governance, accessibility, dependency, threat-model, troubleshooting, ADR, GitHub, hooks, Claude, Cursor, Gemini, Codex/Agents, and generic-agent documentation. The repository also contains a Claude-standard plugin marketplace at .claude-plugin/marketplace.json with development, documentation, release-security, and PR-automation plugins. Each plugin ships manifests, skills, commands, specialist agents, and supporting references; .claude/settings.json registers and enables the marketplace for project sessions.

The Pages build emits production and preview sitemaps, a root sitemap index, robots.txt, llms.txt, llms-full.txt, canonical links, indexing policy, Open Graph/Twitter metadata, Schema.org JSON-LD, and repository/revision provenance. Repository identity and URLs are derived at build time, so adopting repositories never inherit vibey-gh metadata.

Five-surface capability parity

Every canonical capability is exposed and tested through all five supported surfaces:

• Python SDK: vibey_gh.surfaces.invoke(...)
• CLI: the native command and the sdk, api, mcp, and webhook projections
• JSON API: api_dispatch and /v1/capabilities/<name>
• MCP: initialize, tools/list, and tools/call
• Webhook: HMAC-SHA256 authenticated, delivery-ID replay-safe dispatch

The parity contract enumerates every capability from one registry, invokes every adapter, and fails CI if any surface is absent or divergent. Because Docs is a configured scan, missing documentation or interface parity blocks the exact-head PR gate and enters the bounded repair loop before merge.

After the configured Release workflow succeeds on main, the managed github-release.yml workflow tags that exact commit and creates a generated-notes GitHub Release. It is safe to rerun: an existing matching tag/release is reused, while an existing tag at a different SHA is never moved and fails loudly.

The managed release-surfaces.yml workflow follows every successful release on either branch. It builds two persistent ProperDocs sites under the repository's GitHub Pages domain: /develop/ is the test documentation released with TestPyPI, while /main/ is the production documentation released with PyPI. A small root page links both channels. Because GitHub Pages has one deployment per repository, each run restores the latest successful artifact for the other channel before deploying; one branch never erases the other branch's site.

GitHub Packages does not provide a PyPI registry. The workflow therefore publishes the exact wheel and source distribution from the successful Release run as an OCI artifact at ghcr.io/<owner>/<repository>/python. Every artifact receives its immutable version and sha-<commit> tags, plus develop for test releases or main and latest for production releases. The normal TestPyPI and PyPI uploads remain authoritative and are unchanged.

After release surfaces succeed, repository-profile.yml reconciles the repository's description, topics, homepage, collaboration features, merge methods, automatic merge, commit signoff, branch retention, vulnerability alerts, and automated security fixes. An empty description derives a repository-specific description from the consuming repository name. It verifies that Pages, a GitHub Release, a deployment, and the OCI package really exist—the public API does not expose fictional “show Releases/Deployments/Packages” switches. Profile updates use AUTOMERGE_TOKEN when available and never create, update, push, or delete a branch.

If a trusted post-merge workflow fails on develop or main, release-repair.yml reviews its logs with the same constrained agent used for PR repair. A fixable problem is committed to a new vibey-gh/repair/release-* branch and returned through a normal PR, where all checks and the merge train apply. It never pushes a repair directly to—and can never delete—develop or main. Credential, billing, repository-setting, registry, and other operator-only failures are reported with an explicit required action instead of being disguised as code fixes.

Everything project-specific lives in .vibey-gh.toml, so the logic beside it stays general. Every key has a default; a repository that agrees with them needs no file at all.

[fingerprint]
text    = "Made with love by ..."          # the source-header comment
trailer = "Made-With: ..."                 # the commit trailer
sources = ["src/**/*.py", ".github/workflows/*.yml"]

[version]
files         = ["pyproject.toml", "src/pkg/__init__.py"]
content_paths = ["plugins/"]               # a change here is a MINOR release
code_paths    = ["src/"]                   # a change here alone is a PATCH

[branches]
integration = "develop"
release     = "main"

[merge_train]
owner           = "your-login"
trusted_authors = ["your-login", "dependabot[bot]"]

Workflows

Scheduled and manual triggers are recovery backstops; normal delivery is event driven.

Troubleshooting

• Empty Anthropic key: define ANTHROPIC_API_KEY as a repository secret, not only an environment secret, and confirm the privileged workflow can read it.
• Review-blocked promotion: verify the exact-head PR automation / gate; admin fallback is permitted only after all independent policy checks pass.
• Pages 404: select GitHub Actions as the Pages source and rerun Release surfaces.
• Repository profile failure: give AUTOMERGE_TOKEN the administration and security permissions required to reconcile the configured settings.
• Wrong package index: develop must select TestPyPI and main must select PyPI.

See docs/troubleshooting.md and SUPPORT.md; include the workflow URL, exact SHA, and redacted failing-step output when asking for help.

Contributing

Read CONTRIBUTING.md, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md, and AGENTS.md. Changes must preserve the dependency-free runtime, Python 3.11, 100% line and branch coverage, immutable action pins, provenance, and permanent-branch non-deletion guarantee. Report vulnerabilities through SECURITY.md, not a public issue.

Taking the hooks without the workflows

install writes the managed workflows alongside the hooks. A repository that already has richer ones of its own can decline them:

[install]
workflows = []          # hooks and the CLI only
# workflows = ["provenance.yml"]   # or just the ones you want

This is not cosmetic. check verifies that everything it manages is present and current, so without it a repository that deliberately keeps its own workflows would fail the check forever — and a check that cannot pass is a check people route around.

trusted_authors is matched after normalising app/name and name[bot] to the same thing. gh reports a bot author with the app/ prefix while the rest of GitHub writes [bot]; a literal allow-list matches whichever spelling it happens to contain and silently distrusts the other, which once caused an automation to quarantine its own pull request as an outside contribution.

What is deliberately not fingerprinted

• Files whose bytes are meaningful — generated documents verified against a source, Markdown loaded into a model's context. A header would be a diff against the source.
• Anything without comment syntax — JSON, most notably.

The commit trailer covers both without touching them. A naive "comment in every changed file" rule cannot express itself in JSON and corrupts content that is checked byte for byte.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.

Made with ❤️ by Vibey, Developed by Adam Matthew Steinberger (@adammatthewsteinberger).