Manual dispatches

Manual CI dispatch behavior, release-gate fallbacks, and the Windows Testbox Probe. Part of the CI scope and routing index.

Manual dispatches

Ordinary manual CI dispatches run the same job graph as normal CI but force every non-Android scoped lane on: Linux Node shards, bundled-plugin shards, plugin and channel contract shards, Node 24 minimum compatibility, check-*, check-additional-*, built-artifact smoke checks, docs checks, Python skills, Windows, macOS, full iOS build/test and screenshot qualification, and Control UI/native app i18n. Their logical runner profile is always github, independent of the physical fallback selected by runs-on. Node 24 minimum compatibility runs in Full Release Validation and manual dispatches only; push and pull request CI skip it. The exact-head release_gate fallback instead keeps the pull request's macOS, iOS smoke, and generated-native-locale scope without selecting iOS screenshots or native tests. Automatic source PRs and release gates verify native extraction inventory and Android/Apple localization safety without requiring translated or platform-generated output in the same PR. The serialized Native App Locale Refresh workflow rebuilds those artifacts in one isolated PR and enables exact-head auto-merge after required checks pass. Full native parity remains blocking for generated-artifact PRs, generated-scope release gates, ordinary manual CI, full-scope release validation, and release prep. Control UI locale parity remains advisory on automatic PR and main runs and blocking on manual/release CI. Standalone manual CI dispatches run Android only with include_android=true (the release_gate input also forces Android); full-scope release validation enables Android by passing include_android=true without setting release_gate; npm qualification scopes defer Android. Plugin prerelease static checks, the full agentic-plugins sweep, the full extension batch sweep, and plugin prerelease Docker lanes are excluded from CI. The Docker prerelease suite runs only when Full Release Validation dispatches the separate Plugin Prerelease workflow with the release-validation gate enabled.

PR baseline ratchets derive their comparison state from the checked-out synthetic merge tree and verify its head parent against the event head. The max-lines entry chains the environment-variable budget with the same fork-point ref before the assertion-safety check, so production source growth cannot first surface on main. Manual runs use a unique concurrency group so a release-candidate full suite is not cancelled by another push or PR run on the same ref. The optional target_ref input lets a trusted caller run that graph against a branch, tag, or full commit SHA while using the workflow file from the selected dispatch ref; ratchet baselines are compared with the target's merge base against the default-branch head resolved for that run. The release_gate input is an exact-SHA maintainer fallback for capacity-stalled PR CI: it requires target_ref to be a full commit SHA that matches the dispatched branch head and pull_request_number to identify the open PR whose merge tree is validated. Release-gate merge-tree lint uses the same five core stripes as hosted PR CI plus one extension stripe, so no single hosted runner owns the full type-aware lint workload.

gh workflow run ci.yml --ref release/YYYY.M.PATCHgh workflow run ci.yml --ref main -f target_ref=<branch-or-sha> -f include_android=trueVALIDATION_SHA="<full-commit-sha>"gh workflow run full-release-validation.yml --ref main \  -f ref="$VALIDATION_SHA" \  -f expected_sha="$VALIDATION_SHA"

Gateway extended-stable runs npm preflight, Full Release Validation, and plugin npm release from extended-stable/YYYY.M.33; core publish consumes those three run IDs plus the validation attempt. release-ci/* evidence is invalid because publish binds every run to the canonical branch and release SHA. The tag publishes Gateway images and only the extended-stable* aliases; the path skips the regular orchestrator and its ClawHub, native-app, GitHub Release, website, and private dist-tag surfaces. See Monthly Gateway extended-stable publication for commands and recovery.

Windows Testbox Probe

The manual windows-testbox-probe.yml workflow keeps Windows/WSL probing and headless Windows CI on the selected runner_label. The run_windows_ci input (default false) requests both headless CI and a separate native Scheduled Task proof job on GitHub-hosted windows-2025. Neither job depends on the other, so their results remain independently visible; either requested proof failing fails the workflow.

For both proofs, set target_ref to an exact 40-character commit SHA. Both jobs check out that target, and native proof verifies checkout equality before running the lifecycle test. Native preflight runs before setup and requires an interactive Windows session. A noninteractive runner fails qualification rather than silently skipping proof. Selecting windows-2025 does not establish native qualification: the unchanged lifecycle assertions and cleanup must pass on the actual runner. Cleanup and diagnostic upload still run after failure, and retained evidence is removed only after cleanup and upload succeed.