How to force trigger an initial release?

[tisonkun]

Said I'm doing manually releases before and now switch to chart-releaser-action. It seems all runs will be filtered out because:

Discovering changed charts since 'pulsar-2.9.4'...
Nothing to do. No chart changes detected.

See https://github.com/tisonkun/pulsar-helm-chart/actions/runs/3109884015/jobs/5040526282.

What's the best way to switch the release workflow?

[tisonkun]

It seems that I should copy the original index.yaml to gh-pages branch.

[mathew-fleisch]

@tisonkun any thoughts on how to generate the original index.yaml? I seem to have the same problem, but lost the original version. I can't seem to start over, deleted the gh-pages branch, and everything I have done has made no difference. I continue to get the Nothing to do. No chart changes detected. error

Update: I came across this thread: https://github.com/helm/chart-releaser-action/issues/92 and learned a few things:

• I had been using an on-tag, and switched to on-push instead (not sure if that was my problem, but might have helped)
• I was "cutting a git release" before the chart-releaser ran, and it thought there were no new changes, so moving that stage after the chart-releaser unblocked me.
• in the github action, you can set the CR_SKIP_EXISTING environment variable to overwrite an existing tag. Note: if there are already newer versions, you might be better off deleting the gh-branch, recreating it, and forcing index.yaml to be regenerated the next time the action is triggered:

name: Run chart-releaser
uses: helm/chart-releaser-action@v1.5.0
env:
  CR_TOKEN: "${{ secrets.CR_TOKEN }}"
  CR_SKIP_EXISTING: true