After cloning: "Unable to find package reference on deployment action xxx"

Using OctopusDeploy v2019.13.0, self-hosted.

Project AA existed and had a Automatic Release Creation trigger.

We cloned project AA to project BB, and made the necessary additional changes to process and variables.

When trying to create a release for project BB, edit project settings, or Change or Disable ARC, we got an error similar to this:

Unable to find package reference on deployment action ‘Deploy package AA’ in project Projects-153

Note that in project BB, the step had been renamed already. The name shown in the error message was the name of that step in the original project AA.

Fumbling around, I had the idea to disable ARC in project AA, then clone again. To my surprise, just disabling ARC in project AA made project BB usable – we were able to disable or change ARC just fine. And re-enabling ARC in project AA did not produce any further problems.

Unfortunately, an attempt to reproduce the error from scratch – start with a project, clone it, etc. – was unsuccessful.

Hi Ross,

Thanks for getting in touch! I’m very sorry for the confusion this issue has caused you. Good to hear you’ve managed to get it working after testing your idea.

I’ve also been unable to reproduce this issue with a recently created project, so I suspect this project may have been created before a past bugfix (maybe it was an edge case to this one) that wasn’t cleaned up with our upgrade scripts. Roughly how long ago did you first create this project? To dig deeper into this, would you be willing to supply an export of this specific project? You can get this by using the Octopus.Migrator.exe partial-export command which you can email to us at support@octopus.com.

I look forward to hearing back!

Kind regards,

Kenny