ci: dispatch required checks automatically on the release PR

[jbdevprimary]

Follow-up to #56 — closing a gap a review pass caught in my own work.

#56 added workflow_dispatch to the required workflows so a release-please PR could be unblocked. That made the checks runnable but not automatic: something still had to trigger them by hand. Proof it was insufficient — release-please opened a fresh PR (#59) after those merges, and it came back with:

PR #59 head=b20f6a7  check-runs total: 0  state: blocked

Exactly the original deadlock. A manual escape hatch is not a fix.

Fix

The Release job now dispatches ci.yml and validate-packages.yml against the release branch immediately after release-please creates or updates its PR, so the required contexts report with no human involved.

• Gated on steps.release.outputs.prs_created == 'true' — skipped entirely on release-only runs
• Branch parsed from the action's pr output with jq at runtime, not via fromJSON in an env: template, which would fail expansion when the output is empty
• Fails loudly if the branch cannot be read, rather than silently dispatching a wrong ref
• Adds actions: write, scoped to this workflow only

Verification

headBranchName confirmed against the real release-please type definitions (build/src/pull-request.d.ts:2), and core.setOutput('pr', prs[0]) confirmed in the v5.0.0 action source — not assumed.

Parsing tested both ways:

realistic output -> release-please--branches--main--components--pkgs-site  ✓
empty string   -> correctly rejected  ✓
empty object {}  -> correctly rejected  ✓

YAML parses; if/env verified structurally.

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Review details

⚙️ Run configuration

Configuration used: defaults

Review profile: CHILL

Plan: Pro Plus

Run ID: 7551c652-ab81-46a3-8ddc-f5e9cbb0142c

📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between 01e73fc and c52c325.

📒 Files selected for processing (1)

• .github/workflows/release.yml

✨ Finishing Touches

🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Create PR with unit tests
• Commit unit tests in branch ci/auto-dispatch-release-checks

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[amazon-q-developer]

The changes correctly implement automatic workflow dispatch for release PRs. The implementation includes proper error handling, input validation, and follows GitHub Actions security best practices. The bash script safely parses the release-please output with appropriate null checks and uses proper quoting to prevent injection issues. No blocking issues found.

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