v0.68.6

🌟 Release Highlights

This release brings a major new AI engine, significant security hardening, and a wave of reliability fixes — many of them driven directly by community-reported issues.

✨ What's New

• OpenCode engine support — A new engine: opencode option integrates OpenCode as a first-class AI coding agent in your agentic workflows, joining Copilot, Claude, and Codex.

• engine.bare mode — Set engine.bare: true on any workflow to skip loading AGENTS.md context. Ideal for non-code workflows (triage, reporting, ops) where the repository code context is irrelevant and you want a clean, fast agent start.

• Pre-agent steps — A new pre-agent-steps frontmatter field lets you run custom GitHub Actions steps before the AI agent starts. Use this for authentication, environment setup, or any prerequisite work. Learn more

• Idle custom agent wiring — Idle custom agents are now automatically matched and connected to their corresponding workflows, reducing manual configuration for long-running agent sessions.

• Detection caution alerts in all footers — When threat detection identifies issues in a workflow run, a mandatory caution alert is now included in every generated footer (issues, PR descriptions, comments, and more), ensuring reviewers are always informed.

• Cache-memory working-tree sanitization — Before an agent run begins, the working tree is now sanitized to remove planted executables and disallowed files from cached memory. This prevents a class of supply-chain-style attacks via stale cache. Learn more

🐛 Bug Fixes & Improvements

• MCP gateway Docker socket access — Fixed two related bugs: the Docker socket GID is now pre-computed (not evaluated inside a non-shell spawn() call), and the --group-add flag is correctly passed to the MCP gateway container — ensuring Docker-in-Docker tools work reliably inside the sandbox.

• BYOK Copilot model fallback — Fixed an issue where COPILOT_MODEL could be set to an empty string in compiled workflows when using Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) Copilot configurations, causing unexpected model selection.

• Gemini proxy handler — Fixed GEMINI_API_BASE_URL routing issues: the AWF proxy now correctly handles Gemini API requests, resolving API proxy enabled but no API keys found errors for both gemini-cli and the Gemini engine.

• Duplicate action SHA conflict — Fixed a compilation error where two different actions could resolve to the same commit SHA after a gh aw update, causing "two different actions share the exact same commit SHA" failures.

• PR head branch handling — Gracefully handles deleted PR head branches in push_to_pull_request_branch (checked both before fetch and after push failure).

• Scheduled Copilot run hardening — Scheduled Copilot runs are now resilient to transient exit-code-2 startup failures.

• PR reaction activation permissions — Fixed incorrect permission derivation for workflows triggered by pull request reactions.

• MCP gateway health check retry — The port 80 health check now retries on transient container startup delays instead of failing immediately.

• AWF firewall updated to v0.25.22 and MCP gateway updated to v0.2.22.

🌍 Community Contributions

A huge thank you to the community members who reported issues that were resolved in this release!

@arthurfvives

• Gemini engine fails with AWF proxy: GEMINI_API_BASE_URL points to proxy but proxy has no Gemini handler (direct issue)

@bmerkle

• problem after gh aw update: Two different actions share the exact same commit SHA (direct issue)

@bryanchen-d

• MCP Gateway: port 80 health check fails with no retry on transient container startup delay (direct issue)

@dkurepa

• Enabling workflow-wide Docker-in-Docker configuration breaks gh aw workflows (direct issue)

@doughgle

• Gemini CLI Failed: API proxy enabled but no API keys found in environment (direct issue)

@jaroslawgajewski

• bug: Copilot CLI 1.0.21 added a startup model validation step: when COPILOT_MODEL is set (direct issue)

@yskopets

• bug: GOROOT not propagated into agent container despite --env-all and spec §8.5 (direct issue)

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For complete details, see CHANGELOG.

Note

🔒 Integrity filter blocked 2 items

The following items were blocked because they don't meet the GitHub integrity level.

• ae832fb list_commits: has lower integrity than agent requires. The agent cannot read data with integrity below "approved".
• cc2e417 list_commits: has lower integrity than agent requires. The agent cannot read data with integrity below "approved".

To allow these resources, lower min-integrity in your GitHub frontmatter:

tools:
  github:
    min-integrity: approved  # merged | approved | unapproved | none

Generated by Release · ● 1.5M

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What's Changed

• Improve docs mobile table readability and homepage video accessibility metadata by @Copilot in #26660
• Add support for pre-agent-steps before agent execution by @Copilot in #26666
• Fix redact_secrets gateway-token tests after MCP config path refactor by @Copilot in #26681
• Add mandatory caution alert to all generated footers when detection finds issues by @Copilot in #26684
• Stabilize daily Copilot merged-PR report by switching to bounded pre-fetched filtering by @Copilot in #26680
• Align JavaScript MCP scripts log renderer with Copilot output style by @Copilot in #26692
• Add 6-hour [aw] failure investigation workflow by @Copilot in #26694
• Fix lint-go failure from testifylint violations in spec tests by @Copilot in #26686
• Fix CaptureStderr restoration timing in testutil to resolve CI unit test failure by @Copilot in #26687
• Fix audit tool type undercount for Copilot MCP-only runs by @Copilot in #26689
• Scope activation reactions like status-comment targets and compute activation permissions from both target sets by @Copilot in #26693
• docs: clarify MCP gateway API key is leaked by design by @Copilot in #26695
• Add features.awf-diagnostic-logs to enable AWF failure diagnostics artifact collection by @Copilot in #26699
• Allow configuring conclusion failure issue expiration via aw.json by @Copilot in #26688
• Reduce Workflow Skill Extractor token overhead by removing unused tools and pre-indexing workflows by @Copilot in #26682
• Harden MCP Gateway startup health check against transient port-binding delays by @Copilot in #26697
• Fix JS workflow typecheck failure in MCP scripts log parser by @Copilot in #26703
• Always enable Copilot integration ID and remove feature flag gating by @Copilot in #26698
• Increase mcp-cli usage to 80% of agentic workflows by @Copilot in #26715
• Fix DIFC proxy shell integration test to use step-scoped proxy environment by @Copilot in #26704
• Handle deleted PR head branches in push_to_pull_request_branch before fetch and after push failures by @Copilot in #26705
• Fix activation permissions for pull request reactions by @Copilot in #26720
• Harden scheduled Copilot runs against transient exit-code-2 startup failures by @Copilot in #26713
• [log] Add debug logging to 5 Go files by @github-actions[bot] in #26738
• [ubuntu-image] docs: update Ubuntu runner image analysis for 2026-04-16 by @github-actions[bot] in #26741
• Use sort.Strings in GetAllScriptFilenames and add focused ordering tests by @Copilot in #26731
• Use declaration-site blank identifiers in workflow validation paths by @Copilot in #26730
• Enable strict mode and sanitized PR title in refiner input-triggered workflow by @Copilot in #26744
• Fix setup-span staging attribution when aw_info is unavailable by @Copilot in #26742
• Enable engine.bare for non-code workflows to skip AGENTS.md context loading by @Copilot in #26746
• Wire idle custom agents to matching workflows by @Copilot in #26745
• Update smoke Codex workflow to support workflow_dispatch with existing triggers by @Copilot in #26756
• chore: bump default AWF version to v0.25.22 by @Copilot in #26752
• Add Docker socket supplementary group to MCP gateway container command by @Copilot in #26750
• chore: bump default MCP gateway image to v0.2.22 and regenerate compiled artifacts by @Copilot in #26751
• Close package spec audit gaps across workflow/actionpins/stats and normalize README consistency by @Copilot in #26759
• fix: compute Docker socket GID separately for shell expansion by @lpcox in #26771
• Fix copilot_driver JSDoc callback typing to unblock JS CI typecheck by @Copilot in #26786
• feat: add OpenCode engine integration (re-apply PR #18403) by @Copilot in #25830

Full Changelog: v0.68.5...v0.68.6