Bug: Sandbox versions lag behind because they are only generated daily

[JReinhold]

When running npx storybook@next sandbox or npx storybook@latest sandbox, we download the after-storybook directory from the sandbox git repo.
However that repo is only kept up-to-date once a day, meaning that if a new version is released of Storybook, up to 24 hours will pass before that version is generated with the sandbox command.

This has always been like this, but it's now a more apparent issue, because the sandbox CLI will output this:

But then in fact generate an alpha.9 sandbox.

One fix would be to trigger sandbox generation at the end of every version publish. We could trigger the GH workflow so it wouldn't block the publish workflow from completing and it wouldn't cause it to fail either.

Should we do this for all releases or only stable releases?

We could also ignore this and accept that it just is like this.

[shilman]

I wonder if we should just download before-sandbox and install Storybook into it.

[JReinhold]

I wonder if we should just download before-sandbox and install Storybook into it.

But when @shilman? Always? Because the only way to know if the git repo is behind is to download the after-storybook directory and check the files, which is very late in the process.

That might be okay though, given that this is rare.

[shilman]

@JReinhold always. this guarantees that we have the latest version of the code & the install script. at this point i don't remember why we were caching this in the first place.

[JReinhold]

That's an interesting take. This is also what CI does anyway.

Generating after-storybook sandboxes would still add value so we can keep track of what changes over time. We had this acorn incident a few months back where being able to see how a lock file had changed over time was detrimental to pinpointing which upstream version bump caused the incident.
But that doesn't mean we have to use these after-storybook directories for anything other than history tracking.

I'd like to hear @yannbf's opinion when he's back.

[ndelangen]

If we only every use the before-storybook, we can skip a lot of work in the generation of the sandbox repo.

@JReinhold we could generate the after-storybook into another repository, if we wanted to preserve that change detection.

[yannbf]

Apart from using after-storybook in https://storybook.new, we also used after-storybook for performance sake, given that you'd just download the final project instead of having to install a project without SB and then init, and then install things once again