Cancel Workflow Action

This is a GitHub Action that will cancel any previous runs that are not completed for a given workflow.

This includes runs with a status of queued or in_progress.

How does it work?

When you git push, this GitHub Action will capture the current Branch and SHA. It will query GitHub's API to find previous workflow runs that match the Branch but do not match the SHA. These in-progress runs will be canceled leaving only the latest run.

Read more about the Workflow Runs API.

Usage

Typically, you will want to add this action as the first step in a workflow so it can cancel itself on the next push.

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Cancel Previous Runs
        uses: styfle/[email protected]
        with:
          access_token: ${{ github.token }}
      #- name: Run Tests
      #  uses: actions/setup-node@v1
      #  run: node test.js
      # ... etc

Advanced: Canceling Other Workflows

In some cases, you may wish to avoid modifying all your workflows and instead create a new workflow that cancels your other workflows. This can be useful when you have a problem with workflows getting queued.

• Visit https://api.github.com/repos/:org/:repo/actions/workflows to find the Workflow ID(s) you wish to automaticaly cancel.
• Add a new file .github/workflows/cancel.yml with the following:

name: Cancel
on: [push]
jobs:
  cancel:
    name: 'Cancel Previous Runs'
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    timeout-minutes: 3
    steps:
      - uses: styfle/[email protected]
        with:
          workflow_id: 479426
          access_token: ${{ github.token }}

• Note: workflow_id can be a Workflow ID (number) or Workflow File Name (string)
• Note: workflow_id also accepts a comma separated list if you need to cancel multiple workflows

Advanced: Pull Requests from Forks

The default GitHub token access is unable to cancel workflows for pull_request when a pull request is opened from a fork. Therefore, a special setup using workflow_run, which also works for push, is needed. Create a .github/workflows/cancel.yml with the following instead and replace "CI" with the workflow name that contains the pull_request workflow:

name: Cancel
on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: ["CI"]
    types:
      - requested
jobs:
  cancel:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: styfle/[email protected]
      with:
        workflow_id: ${{ github.event.workflow.id }}

Advanced: Ignore SHA

In some cases, you may wish to cancel workflows when you close a Pull Request. Because this is not a push event, the SHA will be the same, so you must use the ignore_sha option.

on:
  pull_request:
    types: [closed]
jobs:
  cleanup:
    name: 'Cleanup After PR Closed'
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    timeout-minutes: 3
    steps:
      - name: Cancel build runs
        uses: styfle/[email protected]
        with:
          ignore_sha: true
          workflow_id: 479426

Contributing

• Clone this repo
• Run yarn install
• Edit ./src/index.ts
• Run yarn build
• Commit changes including ./dist/index.js bundle