build and release updates

[jay-418]

why

There were inconsistencies and duplicated code with: slack messages, s3 links, version naming and validation, artifact uploads, and PR release lifecycles.

This attempts to consolidate all of that into one workflow while preserving safety for production builds only triggering on properly formatted pushed tags (while nighty builds continue to be produced on a schedule using all the same core build logic).

what

• Eliminate nightly.yml; we now consider "nightly" as just another build type (alongside "internal", "beta", and "production")
• github releases and clients will always have in-sync versions, set-metadata will enforce semver increments and provide error messages on rejections
• Extract inline scripts into scripts/ci/*.sh to keep release.yml more readable
• Pubspec and github now inherit the same version from set-metadata, ensuring consistency between github and flutter, but maintaining the same incrementing build number
• Require all publications to succeed before finalizing the release, and cleanup draft releases on failures
• More clear handling for build types:

build type	github release	appcast links	google play & testflight	S3 installer links
production	full release	root, latest, & versioned	yes	latest & versioned
beta	prerelease	latest & versioned	yes	latest & versioned
internal	prerelease	no	no	latest & versioned
nightly	prerelease	no	no	latest & versioned

[jay-418]

works, saves maybe 10 minutes with new caching idk what affect caching even has

• https://github.com/getlantern/lantern/releases/tag/9.0.11-edf3b74a1-20260207T065643Z

[Copilot]

Pull request overview

This PR refactors the build/release pipeline to treat “nightly” as a build type within the main release workflow, centralizes version derivation/validation, and extracts repeated CI logic into reusable scripts to improve readability and consistency.

Changes:

• Replaces the standalone nightly workflow with scheduled/manual build support inside release.yml, including draft-release creation and finalization gating.
• Introduces CI shell scripts for versioning, artifact publishing to S3, and message formatting.
• Updates platform build workflows and the Makefile to consistently apply build-type suffixing and adds dependency caching.

Reviewed changes

Copilot reviewed 11 out of 11 changed files in this pull request and generated 9 comments.

Show a summary per file

File	Description
scripts/ci/version.sh	Adds semver validation and next-version generation for nightly/internal/beta builds.
scripts/ci/publish-to-s3.sh	Uploads platform artifacts to S3 using versioned + latest paths.
scripts/ci/format.sh	Generates release notes, job summary output, and Slack payload text.
Makefile	Adds IOS_INSTALLER naming to include build type suffix for non-production builds.
.github/workflows/release.yml	Consolidates release logic (tag/schedule/dispatch), creates draft releases, uploads to S3/GitHub Release, updates appcast, publishes to stores, and finalizes releases.
.github/workflows/nightly.yml	Removes the standalone nightly workflow.
.github/workflows/build-android.yml	Adds gomobile caching and aligns BUILD_TYPE/INSTALLER_NAME usage.
.github/workflows/build-ios.yml	Adds Go cache and gomobile caching; aligns naming/env usage.
.github/workflows/build-linux.yml	Adds Go/Flutter caching and aligns naming/env usage.
.github/workflows/build-macos.yml	Adds Go cache and gomobile caching; aligns naming/env usage.
.github/workflows/build-windows.yml	Adds Go/Flutter caching and aligns artifact naming with build type.

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[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Copilot reviewed 12 out of 12 changed files in this pull request and generated 11 comments.

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[Copilot]

Pull request overview

Copilot reviewed 12 out of 12 changed files in this pull request and generated 4 comments.

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[atavism]

Maybe a couple issues:

• With the new scheduled job, there's no concurrency guard anymore so we can have overlapping nightlies

• release.yml no longer triggers on v*-beta* / v*-internal* tag pushes because on.push.tags explicitly excludes them. Is that intentional?

[jay-418]

Maybe a couple issues:

* With the new scheduled job, there's no concurrency guard anymore so we can have overlapping nightlies

* `release.yml` no longer triggers on v*-beta* / v*-internal* tag pushes because on.push.tags explicitly excludes them. Is that intentional?

@atavism, good catches, both addressed by f3fb5ba

Let me know if you think this set-metadata enforcement validation here provides adequate safety guarantees to be worth the convenience of consolidation.