Release Workflows

The WooCommerce release process is supported by a set of GitHub Actions workflows that automate repetitive tasks, enforce process guardrails, and send notifications. This page provides a reference of all release-related workflows, organized by how they are triggered.

All workflows are defined in the .github/workflows/ directory.

Scheduled workflows

These workflows run automatically on a daily schedule.

Workflow	Schedule	What it does	When it acts
Release: Assignment	Daily at 18:00 UTC	Checks the release calendar, assigns the release lead, and creates the parent tracking issue with sub-issues for each release in the cycle. Calls Create Tracking Issue for each sub-issue.	~8 weeks before feature freeze.
Release: Enforce Feature Freeze	Daily at 18:00 UTC	Checks the release calendar and creates the release branch from trunk, bumps trunk to the next dev version, publishes a dev release, cleans up old milestones, and sends Slack notifications. Calls Bump version number and Build ZIP file.	On the feature freeze date.
Release: Feature highlight notification	Daily at 09:00 UTC	Checks the release calendar and sends a Slack reminder to teams about the upcoming feature freeze deadline.	~1 week before feature freeze.
Release: Open Issue Warning	Daily at 18:00 UTC	Checks the release calendar and looks for open items in release milestones, sending a Slack notification listing them with assignees.	Within 72 hours of a release date.
Nightly builds	Daily at 00:00 UTC	Builds a nightly ZIP from trunk and uploads it to a GitHub release. Runs every day, independent of the release calendar.	Every day.

Event-driven workflows

These workflows are triggered automatically by GitHub events such as pull requests being merged, releases being published, or issues being labeled.

Cherry-pick and backport

Workflow	Trigger	What it does
Cherry-pick Milestoned PRs to Release Branches	PR closed or milestoned on trunk	Cherry-picks from trunk to the release/x.y branch matching the PR milestone. Uses shared-cherry-pick for the core logic.
Cherry-pick to Frozen Release	PR merged on a release/x.y branch with the cherry pick to frozen release label	Cherry-picks from a release/x.y branch to the next (frozen) release/x.y branch. Uses shared-cherry-pick for the core logic.
Cherry Pick to Trunk	PR merged on a release/x.y branch with the cherry pick to trunk label	Cherry-picks from a release/x.y branch back to trunk. Uses shared-cherry-pick for the core logic.
Block merge if cherry-pick conflicts exist	PR events on cherry-pick-* branches	Fails CI when the cherry pick has conflicts label is present, preventing the PR from being merged until conflicts are resolved and the label is removed.

Milestoning

Workflow	Trigger	What it does
Auto-Add Milestone to Release PRs	PR opened or reopened on a release/x.y branch	Assigns the matching milestone to PRs targeting a release branch.
Auto-assign milestone on merge	PR closed on trunk	Assigns a milestone to PRs merged to trunk that don't already have one.

Release events and validation

Workflow	Trigger	What it does
Release: Release events proxy	Release published or prereleased	Delegates to release-new-release-published to run post-release actions: sends Slack notifications, updates the global changelog for stable releases, and calls Generate Number of Commits and Contributors for beta releases.
Release checks run	Release published or edited	Runs the CI test suite against published releases. Also runs nightly on a schedule.
Release: CFE and PRR issue validation	Issue labeled with code freeze exception, point release request, Approved, or Rejected	Validates Code Freeze Exception and Point Release Request issues, applies labels and milestones to the associated PR, and sends Slack notifications. Being deprecated.

Manual workflows

These workflows are triggered by the release lead during the release process. They are the workflows referenced in the building and publishing guide and in the release tracking issues.

Building and publishing

Workflow	What it does
Release: Bump version number	Updates version numbers across plugin files and creates a PR against the release branch.
Release: Compile changelog	Compiles changelog entries and creates PRs against both trunk and the release branch.
Release: Build ZIP file	Builds the release ZIP and optionally creates a draft GitHub release.
Release: Upload release to WordPress.org	Uploads the release ZIP to WordPress.org SVN.
Release: Update stable tag	Updates the stable tag on WordPress.org and creates PRs to sync it in the repository.

Tracking and analysis

Workflow	What it does
Release: Create Tracking Issue	Creates a Linear tracking issue for a specific release version using the templates in .linear/.
Release: Generate Number of Commits and Contributors	Generates release statistics (commit count, contributors list) and sends a Slack notification.
Release: analyze trends (CFEs and PRRs)	Creates GitHub issues requesting AI analysis of Code Freeze Exceptions and Point Release Requests for a milestone.