publishedPackages doesn't contain packages if not published to npm

Changesets can be used to version non-npm packages as noted by the documentation here:
https://github.com/changesets/changesets/blob/main/docs/versioning-apps.md

When running the action, the action successfully creates tags for my non-npm packages, however when looking at the outputs.publishedPackages part, it doesn't include the packages where the version has been bumped. What this means is I can't have a second step which relies on the release to perform a second action (e.g. publish to a non-npm source like packagist).

There doesn't seem to be anything in the docs which suggests that these are missing on purpose, so I think it's a bug. If it's not a bug and this is indeed the intended outcome, then the docs of the versioning apps section should be updated to note this behaviour. I can confirm published outputs "true" as expected, but publishedPackages just outputs an empty string.

Here's a limited example to showcase what my workflow looks like.

jobs:
  release:
    name: Release
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    outputs:
      published: ${{ steps.changesets.outputs.published }}
      publishedPackages: ${{ steps.changesets.outputs.publishedPackages }}
    steps:
      - name: Create release pull request or create tag for other jobs
        id: changesets
        uses: changesets/action@v1
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        with:
          publish: changeset tag
  second-job:
    name: Do thing based on changesets publish only if particular package is released
    needs: release
    if: ${{ needs.release.outputs.published == 'true' && contains(needs.release.outputs.publishedPackages.*.name, '@company/package') }}
  third-job:
    name: Do different thing based on changesets publish only if a different package is released
    needs: release
    if: ${{ needs.release.outputs.published == 'true' && contains(needs.release.outputs.publishedPackages.*.name, '@company/package_2') }}

+1 on this, this would help with versioned deployments as well (for e.x. deploy a new version on push if a changeset PR was merged which bumps the version of the app)

I can't reproduce this with "@changesets/cli": "^2.30.0". I have the following step in my version & publish workflow:

- name: Create Release Pull Request or Publish Tags
  id: changesets
  uses: changesets/action@v1
  with:
    version: bun changeset version
    publish: bun changeset tag
    createGithubReleases: false
  env:
    GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Sample changeset tag output in the workflow:

$ changeset tag
🦋  New tag:  @myorg/pkg-a@6.1.1
🦋  New tag:  @myorg/pkg-b@7.2.0

publishedPackages then looks like:

[
  {
    name: "@myorg/pkg-a",
    version: "6.1.1",
  }, {
    name: "@myorg/pkg-b",
    version: "7.2.0",
  }
]

And my subsequent steps work fine

This sounds promising, I will test again when I can.

Can I just confirm for your example that @myorg/pkg-a and @myorg/pkg-b are NOT being published to npm? It doesn't appear so from your code, just being certain.

That's right, I have a subsequent job that does publishing to a custom npm registry. This step only adds tags to the local repo, and I push the tags manually after with git push origin 'refs/tags/*'

Appears it still isn't working for me with Changesets CLI ^2.30, but I noticed a bug in my workflow in the debug output so will have to wait for another test opportunity before I can show outputs correctly.

Okay, got another chance and now I'm even more confused, this is my output:

And the associated section in the yml:

Seems like potentially a broken format on output? I'm expecting this (as per the action docs):

My second/third jobs still not firing with this conditional:

You should use fromJSON which should parse the string before accessing it: https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/actions/reference/workflows-and-actions/expressions#example-matching-an-array-of-strings

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publishedPackages doesn't contain packages if not published to npm #532

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publishedPackages doesn't contain packages if not published to npm #532

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KTrain5169 commented on Dec 22, 2025

Dan-Shields commented on Mar 17, 2026

mikeybinns commented on Mar 17, 2026

Dan-Shields commented on Mar 17, 2026

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