poetry publish --no-interaction still prompts when build artifacts exist in dist/, blocking CI pipelines

[muhammed-mizaj]

Description

When running poetry publish in a CI environment with the --no-interaction flag, Poetry still prompts for confirmation if build artifacts already exist in the dist/ directory.

Example prompt:

There are 2 files ready for publishing. Build anyway? (yes/no) [no]

This works fine when running locally, but in CI/CD environments (for example Bitbucket Pipelines or GitHub Actions) there is no interactive input available. As a result, the pipeline stops waiting for input and eventually fails.

My expectation was that --no-interaction would behave the same as answering yes to the prompt and continue execution.

Since CI environments cannot respond to prompts, this makes poetry publish difficult to use reliably unless additional cleanup steps are added.

Workarounds

A common workaround is to manually clear the dist/ directory before running the publish command to avoid triggering the prompt:

clear the dist directory poetry publish --build
Alternatively, ensure that the dist/ directory is empty in your CI environment before the publish step.

Poetry Installation Method

pip

Operating System

MacOS Tahoe

Poetry Version

2.2.1

Poetry Configuration

cache-dir = "/Users/{USER}/Library/Caches/pypoetry"
data-dir = "/Users/{USER}/Library/Application Support/pypoetry"
installer.max-workers = null
installer.no-binary = null
installer.only-binary = null
installer.parallel = true
installer.re-resolve = true
keyring.enabled = true
python.installation-dir = "{data-dir}/python"  # /Users/{USER}/Library/Application Support/pypoetry/python
requests.max-retries = 0
solver.lazy-wheel = true
system-git-client = false
virtualenvs.create = true
virtualenvs.in-project = true
virtualenvs.options.always-copy = false
virtualenvs.options.no-pip = false
virtualenvs.options.system-site-packages = false
virtualenvs.path = "{cache-dir}/virtualenvs"  # /Users/{USER}/Library/Caches/pypoetry/virtualenvs
virtualenvs.prompt = "{project_name}-py{python_version}"
virtualenvs.use-poetry-python = false

Python Sysconfig

sysconfig.log

Paste the output of 'python -m sysconfig', over this line.

Example pyproject.toml

Poetry Runtime Logs

poetry-runtime.log

Paste the output of 'poetry -vvv <command>', over this line.

[gilangjavier]

I'd like to work on this issue. I'll submit a PR.

[radoering]

My expectation was that --no-interaction would behave the same as answering yes to the prompt and continue execution.

I basically agree. However, I think we should print a warning in non-interactive mode if there are files because I would consider it a flaw in the CI workflow if you pass --build and the directory is not empty. In other words, I think you should apply the "workaround" to clear the directory in your CI workflow anyway.