fix: honour --confirm in a terminal, and exit after a prompting command finishes

[wmadden-electric]

At a glance

Run any command that asks for consent, in a real terminal, with the answer already on the command line:

$ prisma orm init --target postgres --authoring psl --confirm my-app
◆  Overwrite the project in my-app? Type my-app to confirm.
│  my-app
└

Before this PR the prompt appears anyway, prefilled with the token, and pressing Enter is rejected. You have to retype it. After this PR the consent is granted before anything is drawn, and no prompt appears.

Then run the same command without --confirm and answer the prompts by hand:

$ prisma orm init --target postgres --authoring psl --skip-install
◇  Overwrite the project in my-app? Type my-app to confirm.
│  my-app
✔ Done
   Next: ...
█

Before this PR the process prints "Done" and never exits. You have to press a key or Ctrl-C to get your shell back. After this PR it exits on its own with the command's exit code.

What this PR changes

Two fixes, one per commit, plus a patch bump of @prisma/cli-engine to 0.6.1 because the engine changed.

1. The engine checks --confirm before deciding whether to prompt. A matching value grants the consent in every session, interactive or not. Each value still grants exactly one consent.
2. The engine stops waiting for stdin to close, and the bin releases stdin itself. The engine no longer awaits the stdin iterator's return(). The bin's stdin adapter unrefs process.stdin when the engine returns the iterator, and refs it again when the next reader starts.

Bug 1: --confirm was ignored when a terminal was attached

ctx.prompt.consent(question, { token }) is how a command asks for explicit consent. The engine looked at the --confirm values only on the branch for non-interactive sessions and --yes. In an interactive session it went straight to rendering the type-to-confirm prompt. The fix moves the --confirm check above that branch so it runs first for every session.

Bug 2: a successful interactive run never exited

This one needs a bit of background on how the engine reads the terminal.

The engine reads keystrokes through an async iterator over stdin. When a run settles, the engine calls return() on that iterator to say it has finished reading, and awaited the result. On a fake stdin in tests that resolves immediately. On Node's real process.stdin it does not.

Node's stdin iterator is an async generator. After the last prompt closes, the generator is still suspended inside an await for the next chunk of input, because clack's prompt wrapper always keeps one read pending. An async generator that is mid-await queues any return() call until it reaches its next yield, which happens only when a keystroke arrives. So the engine's teardown blocked on a keystroke that never came, and while it waited the terminal handle kept the event loop alive.

That also explains why the bug looked intermittent: any stray keystroke after the prompt closed unblocked the teardown and the process exited normally. Runs that failed before their first prompt never opened the iterator, so they exited too.

The fix has two halves because neither side can do it alone. The engine cannot force Node's generator to settle, so it stops waiting on it: returning the iterator is now a signal to the host, not something the run depends on. The host is the only side that can release the terminal, so the bin's stdin adapter (makeStdin in packages/cli/src/runtime.ts) unrefs process.stdin when the engine returns the iterator. An unref'd handle no longer keeps the process alive, and the next reader refs it again so a later prompt in the same process still holds the process open. HostProcess.stdin gains optional ref and unref, which Node's process.stdin already has.

Tests

• Engine, --confirm: an interactive run with the matching --confirm resolves to true without prompting. The same run with a different value still prompts.
• Engine, teardown: a clack-tier test with a stdin whose return() never settles asserts the run still settles.
• Bin adapter: a unit test asserts the ref/unref calls and that the wrapper's return() settles at once even when the underlying one never does.
• Real terminal: packages/cli/tests/pty-exit.test.ts runs a prompting bin under a pseudo-terminal driven by Python's pty module, answers the prompt, and asserts the process exits on its own. It fails without the adapter change and is skipped where python3 is missing. The fixture passes --interactive so the engine's CI detection does not skip the prompt on GitHub Actions.

Verified with pnpm typecheck, pnpm lint, and the full test suites of both packages.

Alternatives considered

• process.stdin.pause() instead of unref(). Rejected because it does nothing here. Node's stdin only stops reading the terminal on the pause event, and that event fires only when the stream is in flowing mode. The async iterator holds it in paused mode with a readable listener, so pause() is a no-op.
• process.stdin.destroy(). Works, and also wakes the stuck generator so everything cleans up. Rejected because it closes file descriptor 0 for the rest of the process, which would break any later code that reads stdin or spawns a child with inherited stdio.
• An engine-only fix. Not possible. A pull-based async iterator has no way to cancel a pending next(), so the pending read after the last prompt is unavoidable on the engine side. Only the host can stop the terminal from keeping the process alive.

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Summary by CodeRabbit

• New Features
  • A matching --confirm token now grants consent in both interactive and non-interactive sessions without displaying a confirmation prompt. If the token does not match, interactive sessions continue to prompt for confirmation.
• Bug Fixes
  • Interactive commands can now finish and let the process exit even when the terminal’s input stream does not finish closing promptly. Input remains available for subsequent runs.

Walkthrough

Matching --confirm tokens now grant consent in interactive sessions without prompting. The engine no longer waits for stdin iterator cleanup to settle. The CLI stdin adapter refs stdin when reading starts and unrefs it when the iterator is returned. New tests cover consent matching, non-settling iterator returns, and process exit after a prompt.

Priority: ➖ Normal

Merge Risk: 🟡 Moderate · up to d33aa

The consent and stdin fixes look sound. However, the new pseudo-terminal exit test fails in CI because CI mode suppresses the prompt it expects to answer. That failure keeps the package test suite red, and it also means the exit-after-prompt fix is unverified in CI. Force interactive mode in the test's child environment before merging.

🚥 Pre-merge checks | ✅ 4 | ❌ 1

❌ Failed checks (1 warning)

Check name	Status	Explanation	Resolution
Docstring Coverage	⚠️ Warning	Docstring coverage is 41.67% which is insufficient. The required threshold is 80.00%. Docstring coverage is scoped to functions touched by this diff. Analyzed 12 functions across 11 files.	Write docstrings for the functions missing them to satisfy the coverage threshold.

✅ Passed checks (4 passed)

Check name	Status	Explanation
Linked Issues check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Out of Scope Changes check	✅ Passed	Check skipped because no linked issues were found for this pull request.
Description check	✅ Passed	The description clearly explains both fixes: interactive --confirm handling and stdin release after prompting commands finish. It also documents tests and alternatives.
Title check	✅ Passed	The title clearly and concisely summarizes the two main changes: honoring --confirm in terminals and exiting after prompting commands finish.

• Fix all pre-merge checks with AI

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🧪 Generate unit tests (beta)

• Commit to this branch
• Create a new PR

✨ Simplify code

• Commit to this branch
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Inline comments:
In `@packages/cli/tests/pty-exit.test.ts`:
- Line 34: Update the child environment in the PTY test to set CI to "false"
alongside PRISMA_DISABLE_TELEMETRY, so inherited CI settings do not disable the
interactive prompt.

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📥 Commits

Reviewing files that changed from the base of the PR and between c5c4aa5 and d33aa92.

📒 Files selected for processing (11)

• packages/cli-engine/src/context.ts
• packages/cli-engine/src/execution/engine.ts
• packages/cli-engine/src/execution/prompts.ts
• packages/cli-engine/src/runtime.ts
• packages/cli-engine/tests/clack-prompts.test.ts
• packages/cli-engine/tests/interaction-affordances.test.ts
• packages/cli/src/runtime.ts
• packages/cli/tests/bin.test.ts
• packages/cli/tests/fixtures/prompting-bin.ts
• packages/cli/tests/fixtures/pty-driver.py
• packages/cli/tests/pty-exit.test.ts

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