chant plan

plan stale

chant plan stale <digest> [--member <name>] [--json]

chant plan stale says whether anything applied to a plan’s targets after the plan was recorded, and lists those applies (#4648). chant checks the plan again when the approved run applies. This read asks the same question earlier, so a platform can find out before it puts the plan in front of a person.

The digest is the planDigest of a pending gate fact, as chant ledger gates --where kind=pending and chant workspace status --json show it. The plan’s targets are each pending fact that records the digest: its member, its op, and its environment. The environment is the fact’s own environment (a component gate’s), else the env of the run that reached the gate. The plan was recorded at the earliest of those facts.

An apply touches the plan when it was recorded after the plan and is one of these:

Ledger	Counts when
An apply under an approval, _gates/<op>/applied.jsonl (chant ledger applies)	It is in the same member and op, for another plan. A failed apply counts too, since it may have changed something.
A deploy record, <env>/releases.jsonl (chant ledger deploys)	It is in the same member and environment, of any component.

An apply of the same plan, an apply before the plan, and anything in another member or environment leave the plan current. It counts applies from any run: a laptop’s, another CI’s, or the platform’s own.

The read uses the local chant/lifecycle branch. It never fetches and writes nothing, so it’s safe to call before asking for an approval. Fetch the branch first to see applies made elsewhere: git fetch origin chant/lifecycle:chant/lifecycle, or the remote the ledger lives on.

In a workspace every member’s ledger is read; --member reads only the ones it names.

$ chant plan stale jcs1-sha256:1f0c…
Plan jcs1-sha256:1f0c…, recorded 2026-11-01T10:00:00Z for deploy at prod in prod.
Stale: 1 apply since.
  2026-11-01T12:00:00Z  deploy of api to prod (by laptop-alex, approved by dave, run ci-77)

Exit code	Meaning
0	The plan is current.
2	The plan is stale.
1	No pending gate fact records the digest, or the ledger couldn’t be read.

Output

With --json it prints a document that follows plan-stale.schema.json, a read contract at version 1, written by chant 0.124.63 and newer. The fields are in the read contract.