release-please creates the same release PR after merge

Question

Release Please Action keeps creating the same release PR (only increasing the version number) after I merge in the release PR (which is also created by Release Please) almost causing an infinite release loop. Any pointer to fix this would be appreciated.

Comparing the subsequent release please PRs, both have the same changelog, but the next one has version number increased like 1.14.0 to 1.15.0.

I am using the same release workflow within another repo and it works as expected.

Some other things I noticed below:

• I was thinking if it's something to do with the past commit messages which don't conform the conventional commits. However, the other repo also has similar past commit messages like Feature/1700306831 add a customer customer panel, instead of feat: add customer panel.

• Release Please includes the previous release under changelog chores like this:

Chores
add estimated wait times to SEL (xxxxxxx)
main: release 1.13.0 (xxxxxxx)

• The repo that is giving me problems with Release Please had allow merge commits setting enabled, compared to the other one which only allowed allow squash merging.

• Both repos have the same workflow file like below:

name: 'Release Please'

on:
    push:
        branches:
            - main

jobs:
    release-please:
        runs-on: ubuntu-latest
        steps:
            - id: release
              uses: google-github-actions/release-please-action@v3
              with:
                  release-type: node
                  changelog-types: '[{"type":"feat","section":"Features","hidden":false},{"type":"fix","section":"Bug Fixes","hidden":false},{"type":"chore","section":"Chores","hidden":false},{"type":"revert","section":"Reverts","hidden":false}]'
                  token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Answer 1

Several posts I found online as well as Chat-GPT suggested going over the past commits, squashing them together and making sure that they conform to the conventional commit requirements.

Instead, I went through the old releases and tags within the mentioned repo. I realized that there were some anomalies, such as: the last release was 1.15.0 but there was a tag with v.20.0.0.

As suggested by release-please I manually set the release number by:

git commit --allow-empty -m "chore: release 21.0.0" -m "Release-As: 21.0.0"

This created a new release PR for version 21.0.0. Once I merged the PR, everything started working as expected.