Support detach/resume like flow for releases with external async steps

Author: melink14Created Apr 5, 2022Updated Sep 11, 2026

New feature motivation

I use semantic release to publish a Chrome extension which has a manual review proces that can take anywhere from an hour to 3 weeks. While this review process is ongoing, no new releases can be published. (In my case, it's almost always less than 12 hours; usually much less).

Right now since the publish step is fire and forget the final github success steps marks all issues/PRs as released with link to the chrome web store to get the new release.

At best this is pre-mature, at worst it's wrong since the publish could fail and require resubmission after making some changes.

New feature description

I'd like to be able to some how save trigger the publish but not claim it's successful until later polling confirms success.

Detaching from a release should save any state required in the repo and then one should be able to resume or abort later on. It should be an error to start a release when one is already pending.

The state could be just a list of which steps to skip which may allow most plugins to remain unchanged.

Source: semantic-release/semantic-release