Table of Contents generated with DocToc

• Context and motivation
• Usage
• Inputs and outputs
  • Inputs
  • Outputs
  • Most often used canceling example
• More Examples
  • Repositories that use Pull Requests from forks
    • Cancel duplicate runs for the source workflow
    • Cancel duplicate jobs for triggered workflow
    • Cancel the "self" source workflow run
    • Cancel the "self" triggered workflow run
    • Fail-fast source workflow runs with failed jobs
    • Fail-fast source workflow runs with failed jobs and corresponding triggered runs
    • Fail-fast for triggered workflow runs with failed jobs
    • Cancel another workflow run
  • Repositories that do not use Pull Requests from forks
    • Cancel duplicate runs for "self" workflow
    • Cancel "self" workflow run
    • Fail-fast workflow runs with failed jobs
    • Cancel all runs with named jobs
  • Development environment
  • License

Cancel Workflow Runs is an action that utilizes workflow_run triggers in order to perform various run cancel operations. The idea is to save number of jobs and free them for other queued runs. It is particularly useful in case your projects development flow where contributors submit pull requests from forks. Using workflow_run trigger enables safe canceling of runs triggered by such pull requests.

In case your CI takes a lot of time and uses a lot of jobs, the action might help your project to reduce job usage and decrease waiting time as it detects and cancels runs that are still executed, but we know already they are superseded by newer runs.

The main purpose of this action is canceling duplicated runs for the same branch as the current run, effectively limiting the resource consumption of the workflow to one run per branch. In short, the action is useful if you want to limit jobs usage on GitHub Actions in case of the usage pattern when fixups/rebases are pushed in quick succession to the same branch (fast iterations on a Pull Request). This is achieved by duplicates cancel mode. The duplicates mode only cancels "past" runs - it does not take into account runs that were started after the "current" run.

Another use case is to cancel the pull_request corresponding to the workflow_run triggered run. This can happen when the triggered workflow_run finds that it makes no sense to proceed with the source run. This is achieved by self cancel mode.

There are also two supplementary cancel modes for the action. Those supplementary use cases allow for further optimisations - failing fast in case we detect that important job failed and canceling duplicates of the workflow_run triggered events in case they execute some heavy jobs. This is achieved by failedJobs and namedJobs cancel modes.

Note that namedjobs cancel mode is solely for the purpose of bypassing current limitations of GitHub Actions. Currently, there is no way to retrieve connection between triggering and triggered workflow in case of workflow_run, as well as retrieving repository and branch of the triggering workflow. The action uses workaround - it requires designing workflows in the way that they pass necessary information via carefully crafted job names. The job names are accessible via GitHub API, and they can be resolved during execution of the workflow using information about the linked workflow available at the workflow runtime. Hopefully this information will soon be available in GitHub Actions allowing removal of namedJobs cancel mode and simplifying the examples and workflows using the Action.

Another feature of the Action is to notify the PRs linked to the workflows. Normally when workflows get cancelled there is no information why it happens, but this action can add an explanatory comment to the PR if the PR gets cancelled. This is controlled by notifyPRCancel boolean input.

Also, for the workflow_run events, GitHub does not yet provide an easy interface linking the original Pull Request and the Workflow_run. You can ask the CancelWorkflowRun action to add extra comment to the PR adding explanatory message followed by a link to the workflow_run run.

You can take a look at the description provided in the Apache Airflow's CI and the workflows

Started from simple cancel workflow developed by n1hility that implemented cancelling previous runs before introducing workflow_run type of event by GitHub Actions: Cancel.

If you want a comprehensive solution, you should use the action as follows:

1. In case your project does not use public forks, it's enough to have one action with the duplicates cancel mode in the workflow. This is a rare thing in open-source projects (usually those projects accept pull requests from forks) and more often applicable for private repositories.

2. If you use forks, you should create a separate "Cancelling" workflow_run triggered workflow. The workflow_run should be responsible for all canceling actions. The examples below show the possible ways the action can be utilized.

The job cancel modes work as follows:

The most common canceling example is that you want to cancel all duplicates appearing in your build queue. As of 4.1 version of the Action this can be realised by single workflow run that can cancel all duplicates for all running workflows. It is resistant to temporary queues - as it can cancel also the future, queued workflows that have duplicated, fresher (also queued workflows and this is recommended for everyone.

The below example is a "workflow_run" type of event. The workflow_run event always has "write" access that allows it to cancel other workflows - even if they are coming from pull request.

name: Cancelling Duplicates
on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: ['CI']
    types: ['requested']

jobs:
  cancel-duplicate-workflow-runs:
    name: "Cancel duplicate workflow runs"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: potiuk/cancel-workflow-runs@v4_1
        name: "Cancel duplicate workflow runs"
        with:
          cancelMode: allDuplicates
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          sourceRunId: ${{ github.event.workflow_run.id }}

Note that you can combine the steps below in several steps of the same job. The examples here are showing one step per case for clarity.

Note that in case you implement separate "Canceling workflow", following the examples below, you do not need to add cancel action to any other workflow. All Cancel actions should be configured in this Cancelling workflow.

Those examples show how you should configure your project with separate Cancelling workflow which is triggered via workflow_run trigger.

In the example belows we use the following names:

• triggered workflow - the "Cancelling" workflow - separate workflow triggered by the workflow_run event. Its main job is to manage cancelling of other workflows.

• triggered run - the run of the triggered workflow. It is triggered by another ("source") run. In the examples below, this run is in "Cancelling" workflow. It always runs in the context of the main repository, even if it is triggered by a Pull Request from a fork.

• source workflow - the "main" workflow - main workflow that performs CI actions. In the examples below, this is a "CI" workflow.

• source run - the run of the source workflow. It is the run that triggers the triggered run, and it runs most of the CI tasks. In the examples below those are the runs of "CI" workflow.

Cancel past, duplicate source runs of the source workflow. This workflow cancels duplicated, past runs (for the same branch/repo that those associated with the source run that triggered the triggered run). You have to create it with the sourceRunId input with the value of ${{ github.event.workflow_run.id }} in order to work correctly.

In the example below, the Canceling run cancels past, duplicate runs from the CI with the same branch/repo as the source run which triggered it - effectively what's left after the action is only the latest source run of "CI" from the same branch/repo.

This works for all kind of triggering events (push, pull_request, schedule ...). It works for events triggered in the local repository, as well as triggered from the forks, so you do not need to set up any extra actions to cancel internal Pushes/Pull Requests.

You can also choose to skip certain types of events (for example push and schedule if you want your jobs to run to full completion for this kind of events.

name: Cancelling
on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: ['CI']
    types: ['requested']

jobs:
  cancel-duplicate-workflow-runs:
    name: "Cancel duplicate workflow runs"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: potiuk/cancel-workflow-runs@v4_1
        name: "Cancel duplicate workflow runs"
        with:
          cancelMode: duplicates
          cancelFutureDuplicates: true
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          sourceRunId: ${{ github.event.workflow_run.id }}
          notifyPRCancel: true
          skipEventTypes: '["push", "schedule"]'

Note that duplicate cancel mode cannot be used for workflow_run type of event without sourceId input. The action will throw an error in this case because it is not really doing what you would expect it to do. All workflow_run events have the same branch and repository (they are all run in the context of the target branch and repository) no matter what is the source of the event, therefore cancelling duplicates would cancel all the runs originated from all the branches and this is not really expected.

If you want to cancel duplicate runs of the triggered workflow, you need to utilize the namedJob cancel mode as described in the next chapter Cancel duplicate jobs for triggered workflow using outputs from the duplicate canceling for source workflow run above.

Hopefully we will have an easier way of doing that in the future once GitHub Actions API will allow searching for source runs (it's not available at this moment).

Cancels all past runs from the triggered workflow if any of the job names match any of the regular expressions. Note that it does not take into account the branch of the runs. It will cancel all runs with matching job names no mater the branch/repo.

This example is much more complex. It shows the actual case on how you can design your jobs using with using outputs from the cancel duplicate action and running subsequent cancel with namedJobs cancel mode. Hopefully in the future better solution will come from Github Actions and such cancel flow will be natively supported by GitHub Actions but as of now (August 2020) such native support is not possible. The example below uses specially named jobs that contain Branch, Repo and Run id of the triggering run. The cancel operation finds the runs that have jobs with the names following pattern containing the same repo and branch as the source run branch and repo in order to cancel duplicates.

In the case below, this workflow will first cancel the "CI" duplicate runs from the same branch and then it will cancel the runs from the Cancelling workflow which contain the same repo and branch as in job names, effectively implementing cancelling duplicate runs for the Cancelling workflow.

name: Cancelling
on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: ['CI']
    types: ['requested']

jobs:
  cancel-duplicate-ci-runs:
    name: "Cancel duplicate CI runs"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    outputs:
      sourceHeadRepo: ${{ steps.cancel.outputs.sourceHeadRepo }}
      sourceHeadBranch: ${{ steps.cancel.outputs.sourceHeadBranch }}
      sourceHeadSha: ${{ steps.cancel.outputs.sourceHeadSha }}
      sourceEvent: ${{ steps.cancel.outputs.sourceEvent }}
    steps:
      - uses: potiuk/cancel-workflow-runs@v4_1
        id: cancel
        name: "Cancel duplicate CI runs"
        with:
          cancelMode: duplicates
          cancelFutureDuplicates: true
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          notifyPRCancel: true
          notifyPRMessageStart: |
            Note! The Docker Images for the build are prepared in a separate workflow,
            that you will not see in the list of checks.

            You can checks the status of those images in:
      - uses: potiuk/cancel-workflow-runs@v4_1
        name: "Cancel duplicate Cancelling runs"
        with:
          cancelMode: namedJobs
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          notifyPRCancel: true
          jobNameRegexps: >
            ["Build info
            repo: ${{ steps.cancel.outputs.sourceHeadRepo }}
            branch: ${{ steps.cancel.outputs.sourceHeadBranch }}.*"]

  build-info:
    name: >
      Build info
      repo: ${{ needs.cancel-workflow-runs.outputs.sourceHeadRepo }}
      branch: ${{ needs.cancel-workflow-runs.outputs.sourceHeadBranch }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    needs: [cancel-duplicate-ci-runs]
    env:
      GITHUB_CONTEXT: ${{ toJson(github) }}
    steps:
      - name: >
          [${{ needs.cancel-workflow-runs.outputs.sourceEvent }}] will checkout
          Run id: ${{ github.run_id }}
          Source Run id: ${{ github.event.workflow_run.id }}
          Sha: ${{ needs.cancel-workflow-runs.outputs.sourceHeadSha }}
          Repo: ${{ needs.cancel-workflow-runs.outputs.sourceHeadRepo }}
          Branch: ${{ needs.cancel-workflow-runs.outputs.sourceHeadBranch }}
        run: |
          printenv

This is useful in case you decide to cancel the source run that triggered the triggered run. In the case below, the step cancels the CI workflow that triggered the Cancelling run.

name: Cancelling
on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: ['CI']
    types: ['requested']

  cancel-self-source-workflow-run:
    name: "Cancel the self CI workflow run"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: "Cancel the self CI workflow run"
        uses: potiuk/cancel-workflow-runs@v4_1
        with:
          cancelMode: self
          notifyPRCancel: true
          notifyPRCancelMessage: Cancelled because image building failed.
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          sourceRunId: ${{ github.event.workflow_run.id }}

This is useful in case you decide to cancel the triggered run. The difference vs. previous case is that you do not specify the sourceRunId input.

In the case below - self workflow will be cancelled.

name: Cancelling
on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: ['CI']
    types: ['requested']

  cancel-self-cancelling-run:
    name: "Cancel the self Canceling workflow run"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: "Cancel the self Cancelling workflow run"
        uses: potiuk/cancel-workflow-runs@v4_1
        with:
          cancelMode: self
          notifyPRCancel: true
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Note that if you want to cancel both - source workflow and self workflow you need to first cancel the source workflow, and then cancel the self one, not the other way round :).

Cancels all runs from the source workflow if there are failed jobs matching any of the regular expressions. Note that the action does not take into account the branch/repos of the runs. It will cancel all runs with failed jobs no mater the branch/repo.

In the case below, if any of CI workflow runs (even with different branch heads) have failed jobs names matching ^Static checks$ and ^Build docs^ or ^Build prod image .* regexp - they will be cancelled.

name: Cancelling
on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: ['CI']
    types: ['requested']

jobs:
  fail-fast-triggered-workflow-named-jobs-runs:
    name: "Fail fast CI runs"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: potiuk/cancel-workflow-runs@v4_1
        name: "Fail fast CI runs"
        with:
          cancelMode: failedJobs
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          sourceRunId: ${{ github.event.workflow_run.id }}
          notifyPRCancel: true
          jobNameRegexps: '["^Static checks$", "^Build docs$", "^Build prod image.*"]'

Note that if you not only want to cancel the failed triggering workflows but also the want to fail the corresponding "Cancelling" workflows, you need to implement the solution described in the next chapter.

Cancels all runs from the source workflow if there are failed jobs matching any of the regular expressions, also cancels the corresponding triggered runs. Note that the action does not take into account the branch/repos of the runs. It will cancel all runs with failed jobs no mater the branch/repo.

In the case below, if any of CI workflow runs (even with different branch heads) have failed jobs names matching ^Static checks$ and ^Build docs^ or ^Build prod image .* regexp - they will be cancelled as well as the corresponding "Cancelling" workflow runs.

There is no native support yet in GitHub actions to do it easily, so the example below shows how this can be achieved using namedJobs and output returned from the previous Cancel Workflow Runs action. Hopefull this will be simplified when GitHub Actions introduce native support for it.

name: Cancelling
on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: ['CI']
    types: ['requested']

jobs:
  fail-fast-triggered-workflow-named-jobs-runs:
    name: "Fail fast CI runs"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: potiuk/cancel-workflow-runs@v4_1
        name: "Fail fast CI. Source run: ${{ github.event.workflow_run.id }}"
        id: cancel-failed
        with:
          cancelMode: failedJobs
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          sourceRunId: ${{ github.event.workflow_run.id }}
          notifyPRCancel: true
          jobNameRegexps: '["^Static checks$", "^Build docs$", "^Build prod image.*"]'
      - name: "Extract canceled failed runs"
        id: extract-cancelled-failed-runs
        if: steps.cancel-failed.outputs.cancelledRuns != '[]'
        run: |
            REGEXP="Fail fast CI. Source run: "
            SEPARATOR=""
            for run_id in $(echo "${{ steps.cancel-failed.outputs.cancelledRuns }}" | jq '.[]')
            do
                REGEXP="${REGEXP}${SEPARATOR}(${run_id})"
                SEPARATOR="|"
            done
            echo "::set-output name=matching-regexp::${REGEXP}"
      - name: "Cancel triggered 'Cancelling' runs for the cancelled failed runs"
        if: steps.cancel-failed.outputs.cancelledRuns != '[]'
        uses: potiuk/cancel-workflow-runs@v4_1
        with:
          cancelMode: namedJobs
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          notifyPRCancel: true
          jobNameRegexps: ${{ steps.extract-cancelled-failed.runs.matching-regexp }}

Note that if you not only want to cancel the failed triggering workflows but also the want to fail the corresponding "Cancelling" workflows, you need to implement the solution described in the next chapter.

Cancels all runs from the triggered workflow if there are failed jobs matching any of the regular expressions. Note that it does not take into account the branch/repos of the runs. It will cancel all runs with failed jobs no mater the branch/repo.

In the case below, if any of Cancelling workflow runs (even with different branch heads) have failed jobs names matching ^Static checks$ and ^Build docs^ or ^Build prod image .* regexp - they will be cancelled.

name: Cancelling
on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: ['CI']
    types: ['requested']

jobs:
  fail-fast-triggered-workflow-named-jobs-runs:
    name: "Fail fast Canceling runs"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: potiuk/cancel-workflow-runs@v4_1
        name: "Fail fast Canceling runs"
        with:
          cancelMode: failedJobs
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          jobNameRegexps: '["^Static checks$", "^Build docs$", "^Build prod image.*"]'

This is useful in case you decide to cancel the source run that triggered the triggered run. In the case below, the step cancels the CI workflow that triggered the Cancelling run.

name: Cancelling
on:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: ['CI']
    types: ['requested']

  cancel-other-workflow-run:
    name: "Cancel the self CI workflow run"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: "Cancel the self CI workflow run"
        uses: potiuk/cancel-workflow-runs@v4_1
        with:
          cancelMode: duplicates
          cancelFutureDuplicates: true
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          workflowFileName: other_workflow.yml

Note that examples in this chapter only work if you do not have Pull Requests coming from forks (so for example if you only work in a private repository). When those action runs within the usual pull_request triggered runs coming from a fork, they have not enough permissions to cancel running workflows.

If you want to cancel pull_requests from forks, you need to use workflow_run triggered runs - see the Repositories that use Pull Requests from fork chapter.

Note that in case you configure the separate workflow_run Cancelling workflow, there is no need to add the action to the "source" workflows. The "Canceling workflow" pattern handles well not only Pull Requests from the forks, but also all other cases - including cancelling Pull Requests for the same repository and canceling scheduled runs.

Cancels past runs for the same workflow (with the same branch).

In the case below, any of the direct "push" events will cancel all past runs for the same branch as the one being pushed. However, it can be configured for "pull_request" (in the same repository) or "schedule" type of events as well. It will also notify the PR with the comment containining why it has been cancelled.

name: CI
on: push
jobs:
  cancel-duplicate-workflow-runs:
    name: "Cancel duplicate workflow runs"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: potiuk/cancel-workflow-runs@v4_1
        name: "Cancel duplicate workflow runs"
        with:
          cancelMode: duplicates
          cancelFutureDuplicates: true
          notifyPRCancel: true

This is useful in case you decide to cancel "self" run.

In the case below - own workflow will be cancelled immediately. It can be configured for "push", "pull_request" (from the same repository) or "schedule" type of events.

name: CI
on: push
jobs:
  cancel-self-run:
    name: "Cancel the self workflow run"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: "Cancel the self workflow run"
        uses: potiuk/cancel-workflow-runs@v4_1
        with:
          cancelMode: self
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          notifyPRCancel: true

Cancels all runs (including self run!) if they have failed jobs matching any of the regular expressions. Note that it does not take into account the branch of the running jobs. It will cancel all runs with failed jobs, no matter what branch originated it.

In the case below, if any of the own workflow runs have failed jobs matching any of the ^Static checks$ and ^Build docs^ or ^Build prod image .* regexp, this workflow will cancel the runs.

name: CI
on:
  push:

jobs:
  cancel-self-failed-runs:
    name: "Cancel failed runs"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: potiuk/cancel-workflow-runs@v4_1
        name: "Cancel failed runs"
        with:
          cancelMode: failedJobs
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          jobNameRegexps: '["^Static checks$", "^Build docs$", "^Build prod image.*"]'
          notifyPRCancel: true

Cancels all runs (including self run!) if any of the job names match any of the regular expressions. Note that it does not take into account the branch of the runs. It will cancel all runs with matching jobs, no matter what branch originated it.

This is useful in case of job names generated dynamically.

In the case below, if any of the "self" workflow runs has job names that matches any of the ^Static checks$ and ^Build docs^ or ^Build prod image .* regexp, this workflow will cancel the runs.

on:
  push:
  workflow_run:
    workflows: ['CI']
    types: ['requested']

jobs:
  cancel-self-failed-runs:
    name: "Cancel the self workflow run"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: potiuk/cancel-workflow-runs@v4_1
        name: "Cancel past CI runs"
        with:
          cancelMode: namedJobs
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          jobNameRegexps: '["^Static checks$", "^Build docs$", "^Build prod image.*"]'
          notifyPRCancel: true

It is highly recommended tu use pre commit. The pre-commits installed via pre-commit tool handle automatically linting (including automated fixes) as well as building and packaging Javascript index.js from the main.ts Typescript code, so you do not have to run it yourself.

MIT License covers the scripts and documentation in this project.