[glen-84]

Summary

A release created through the GitHub UI instead of by pushing a tag is already published when the release workflow starts, and an immutable release can't take assets after publication. The workflow skipped draft creation for such a release, published every package, and only failed when attaching the assets at the end.

• The create-draft job now fails when the tag's release exists and is not a draft. An existing draft is still reused, so re-running a release keeps working.
• publish-nuget, publish-npm, publish-nitro-ops, and publish-aspire-nitro-ops now need create-draft, so a release that is already published when the run starts stops the run before anything is published. The build jobs still run alongside it.

Test plan

• Ran the step's script against this repository: a tag with a published release (16.0.0) fails with the error, and a tag without a release goes on to create the draft.
• Ran it with a stubbed gh that reports an existing draft: it reuses the draft and exits successfully.
• actionlint reports no new findings for the workflow.

[Copilot]

🟡 Changes recommended

The release state is not revalidated before external publishing, leaving a race that can still cause partial publication.

1 open issue

• Revalidate release draft immediately before publishing · New

What changed in this PR

Updates the release workflow to prevent package publishing when the tag already has a published GitHub release, while preserving reuse of existing draft releases.

Changes:

• Detects published, draft, and absent releases.
• Fails early for already-published releases.
• Gates package and Nitro operation publishing on successful draft preparation.

File	Description
.github/​workflows/​release.yml	Adds release-state validation and gates publishing jobs on successful draft validation.

_{Review effort: Lite}