Launchdarkly Automations Archival Settings

LaunchDarkly Automations Auto-archival Settings

You’re using a skill that reads and changes a project’s auto-archival settings, from the “Automatic archival” section of the project’s Settings > Automations page. Auto-archival archives flags without a person in the loop unless approvals are required. Treat every write as production automation with a blast radius.

Prerequisites

This skill requires the remotely hosted LaunchDarkly MCP server.

Required MCP tools:

• get-automations with section: "archival" and projectKey: the project’s archival settings and automationsPage, the link to the project’s Automations page.
• update-automations with projectKey and an archival object: change one or more settings, or turn archival off. Omitted fields keep their stored values. Send archival on its own, without accountWide, repo, or cleanup. It cannot turn archival on (see Turn it on).

Optional: get-projects to pick the project, search-members to resolve notification member IDs (team keys come from the user), get-approval-requests for pending archival approvals.

If get-automations has no section argument, or rejects section, the server has not picked up cleanup and archival yet. Ask the user to reconnect the LaunchDarkly MCP server once. If it still has none, guide the browser steps in references/browser-steps.md (opens in a new tab) instead. Do not invent REST calls.

If a call fails with “automatic archival is not available for this account yet”, the account does not have the feature. Tell the user and stop; do not retry or try other tools.

What the settings mean

Durations are in seconds. Show them to the user in hours or days.

Core Principles

1. Confirm before every write. State the current and proposed values, wait for a yes that names the change in this turn, then write. A yes from an earlier turn, or a vague “go ahead”, is not enough.
2. Only a person can turn it on. Turning archival on requires confirming its risk on the Automations page. Never claim you turned it on.
3. Keep approvals unless asked. Never set requireApproval to false unless the user explicitly asked to archive without approvals. Say that flags will then be archived without review.
4. Lists replace. notifyMemberIds and notifyTeamKeys replace the whole stored list. To add one recipient, read the current list and send it with the new one.
5. Shorter means sooner. Lowering graceSeconds or raising maxArchivalsPerRun archives more flags sooner. Say so in the proposal.

Workflows

Read the settings

get-automations with section: "archival" and projectKey. Report whether it is on, the grace period, whether approvals are required, the run limit, and the notification recipients.

Change a setting

1. Read the settings: get-automations with section: "archival".

2. Propose the change, for example:

   Automatic archival in project default waits 1 day before archiving a ready flag. Change it to 7 days? Ready flags will stay unarchived for a week before they are archived.

3. After the user confirms, call update-automations with projectKey, confirm: true, and an archival object holding only the confirmed fields.

4. The response lists changed and the settings as read back. If it reports a mismatch, or says the settings changed after they were read, show the user the current values from get-automations with section: "archival" and ask again before retrying.

Settings can be changed while archival is off, so a user can set them before a person turns it on.

Turn it off

Propose it (“Turn off automatic archival for project default? No more flags will be archived automatically; flags already archived stay archived.”), then update-automations with projectKey, archival: { "enabled": false }, and confirm: true.

Turn it on

The agent cannot turn archival on. If the user asks:

1. Read the settings: get-automations with section: "archival", and set any other settings they asked for first (see Change a setting).
2. Give the user automationsPage. In the “Automatic archival” section, they turn on Enable automatic archival and confirm the “Enable automatic archival?” dialog. Turning it on requires permission to archive every flag in the project.
3. When they say it is done, call get-automations with section: "archival" once and report whether enabled is true. Do not poll.

If update-automations returns applied: false with a nextStep, nothing changed: follow these steps.

Why was (or wasn’t) a flag archived automatically?

Read-only. Ask for the flag key if the user did not give one. Then check in this order, and stop at the first cause you can show from a tool result:

1. get-automations with section: "archival": enabled is false, so archival is off for the project.
2. get-flags with projectKey and flagKey: the flag has no maintainer (flags with no maintainer are never archived automatically), or it is already archived (archived true; a flag archived automatically has the auto-archived tag).
3. get-flag-status-across-envs with allEnvs: true, and get-projects with projectKey and fullSettings: true (settings.lifecycle holds the checks and day thresholds for ready to archive): the flag is still evaluated or does not meet those checks, so it is not ready to archive.
4. requireApproval is true: look for a pending approval request with get-approval-requests.

These tools do not show when a flag became ready to archive or which flags a run picked. If none of the checks above explains it, say the likely causes without claiming either one: it became ready less than graceSeconds ago, or more flags were ready than maxArchivalsPerRun and the rest wait for a later run.

Flags archived this way get the auto-archived tag. “View auto-archived flags” on the Automations page lists them. Do not change settings to try something.

Errors

• “automatic archival is not available for this account yet”: see Prerequisites.
• 403 on a write: the member lacks permission to update the project’s lifecycle settings. Say so, and stop.

Out of scope

• Archiving or restoring one flag: use the flag tools.
• Auto-cleanup: use launchdarkly-automations-cleanup-settings.
• Auto-flagging and auto-releasing: use launchdarkly-release-autopilot-settings.

References

• references/browser-steps.md (opens in a new tab): the same settings in the browser, for servers without these tools