Using continue on error expression

title: "Using continue-on-error in GitHub Actions" description: "Learn how to apply continue-on-error at step and job level to prevent non-critical failures from stopping your GitHub Actions workflows."

GitHub Actions provides the continue-on-error keyword to help you manage non-critical failures in your CI/CD workflows. By default, a non-zero exit code stops the job and any downstream steps. With continue-on-error, you can:

• Skip failing steps while continuing the job
• Mark jobs as neutral instead of failed

Example Scenario

Imagine a Code Coverage job that runs tests and then validates coverage. If coverage falls below your threshold, the job fails immediately:

ERROR: Coverage for lines (88.88%) does not meet global threshold (90%)
File              % Stmts   % Branch   % Funcs  % Lines   Uncovered Line #s
All files         87.88      50         87.5    88.88     21,47-48,56
app.js            87.5       88.88     87.5     88.88     21,47-48,56
Error: Process completed with exit code 1.

Because of this exit code, the artifact upload step never runs.

Step-Level continue-on-error

To allow subsequent steps to execute even when coverage fails, add continue-on-error: true to the Check Code Coverage step:

jobs:
  code-coverage:
    name: Code Coverage
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout Repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Setup Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v3
        with:
          node-version: 18

      - name: Install Dependencies
        run: npm install

      - name: Check Code Coverage
        continue-on-error: true
        run: npm run coverage

      - name: Archive Test Result
        uses: actions/upload-artifact@v3
        with:
          name: Code-Coverage-Result
          path: coverage
          retention-days: 5

After this change, the coverage step logs an error but the workflow proceeds:

Run npm run coverage
► Solar [email protected] coverage
    nyc --reporter cobertura --reporter lcov --reporter text --reporter json-summary mocha app-test.js --timeout 10000 --exit

Server successfully running on port - 3000

Planets API Suite
  Fetching Planet Details
    ✓ it should fetch a planet named Mercury (34ms)
    … (other tests)

ERROR: Coverage for lines (88.8%) does not meet global threshold (90%)
Uploading artifact Code-Coverage-Result

Quick Comparison

Job-Level continue-on-error

For matrix-based workflows, you can skip failures across all steps by setting continue-on-error at the job level:

jobs:
  code-coverage:
    runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }}
    continue-on-error: ${{ matrix.experimental }}
    strategy:
      fail-fast: false
      matrix:
        node: [13, 14]
        os: [macos-latest, ubuntu-latest]
        experimental: [false]
        include:
          - node: 15
            os: ubuntu-latest
            experimental: true
    steps:
      # same steps as above…

When matrix.experimental is true, failures in that job are treated as neutral, allowing the workflow to complete.

Workflow Summary

In the summary below, unit tests pass, the code coverage job finishes with an error annotation, and the Code-Coverage-Result artifact is uploaded:

Links and References

• Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions
• Storing workflow data as artifacts