Your publish pipeline is green. Nobody can install your plugin.

Silent failure For three weeks nobody could install your plugin. The publish job was green every single day. You find out when a user asks why the version is so old. Three weeks green, zero installs This happened to us. The publish job for our JetBrains plugin reported success on every run since the middle of July. The plugin was not in the marketplace at all. The registry API answered with a 404. A search for the product name returned nothing. Meanwhile the build was green, the release notes were written, and the changelog was up to date. Nobody noticed. Not the pipeline, not the dashboard, not us. The gap between the last good release and the discovery was three weeks. Your pipeline is not lying to you This is the part worth understanding, because it is why the same thing is probably waiting in your repository too. A release pipeline has one job: get the artifact somewhere a stranger can install it. Almost every pipeline checks something else. It checks that the upload command exited zero. Those two questions agree nearly always. Our publish step went further and did the sensible thing. It caught the failure, compared the error text against a list of known-harmless cases, and exited zero for those. One of those cases was pending moderation. A new version sits in review before it becomes visible. Failing the build for that would be noise, so it was allowed through. Here is the trap. A harmless transient state and a permanent block produce the same message. Once the plugin was stuck, every later run matched the same friendly pattern and reported success. The pipeline answered its question correctly. It was the wrong question. The check that catches it, in about two minutes Ask the store, not the pipeline. That is the whole idea, and you can add it today without changing anything else. One: after publishing, fetch the public listing the way a stranger would. No credentials, no internal API, no authenticated client. Seeing what an outsider sees is the entire point. Tw