Autoplan creates pending GitHub Check regardless of project changes since v0.33

[artych]

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Overview of the Issue

Starting from v0.33, we've observed that a GitHub CI check is deliberately created in the "pending" state during the autoplan run, regardless of whether any projects have changed files. Prior to v0.33, a check status was only created if changes were detected in one or more projects.

Looking at the v0.33 changes, we suspect this behavior is a side effect of PR #5242. Previously, the creation of the check status was gated behind the condition if len(projectCmds) > 0, but this logic appears to have been removed in that update.

Perhaps this is an intentional change, but we haven’t found any mention or documentation of it in the release notes or related discussions. Clarification would be appreciated.

Reproduction Steps

Reproducing the issue should be straightforward. We've consistently seen the atlantis/plan check remain in a pending state on every pull request since upgrading to v0.33.

[dosubot]

Hi @artych! I'm Dosu and I’m helping the atlantis team.

This behavior is a known bug introduced in Atlantis v0.33 and is not intentional. Maintainers have acknowledged the issue and are working on a fix. The problem is that Atlantis now creates GitHub Checks (like atlantis/plan) on all pull requests, even when no relevant project files have changed, which started happening between v0.32 and v0.33. You can see the discussion and confirmation from maintainers in issue #5389.

The underlying cause is a change in the autoplan logic: the code that previously gated check creation behind a condition like if len(projectCmds) > 0 was removed, so commit statuses are now always created—even when there are no projects to plan. You can see this in the current implementation of runAutoplan in plan_command_runner.go.

There is no documentation or release note describing this change, as it was not an intentional feature. If this issue is blocking your workflow, consider monitoring #5389 for updates or temporarily downgrading to v0.31 or v0.32 as a workaround.

To reply, just mention @dosu.

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[artych]

Closing this in favour of the existing #5389