Cancelling and Skipping Workflows

In this guide, you’ll learn how to prevent unnecessary GitHub Actions runs by skipping workflows via commit messages, as well as how to cancel jobs that are already in progress.

Skipping Workflows via Commit Messages

When you include specific keywords in your commit message, GitHub Actions will ignore push and pull_request events for that commit. This helps you save CI minutes and speed up your development process.

Supported Keywords

You can also place a footer after two blank lines in your commit message:

skip-checks: true

Example

Imagine you only changed the documentation in README.md and want to skip all workflows:

git add README.md
git commit -m "Update README.md [skip ci]"
git push

Because the commit message contains [skip ci], GitHub Actions will skip every workflow for that push. Visit the Actions tab in your repository to confirm there are no new runs.

Cancelling In-Progress Workflow Runs

If you need to stop a workflow that’s already running, follow these steps:

1. Go to the Actions tab in your GitHub repository.
2. Select the workflow run you wish to cancel.
3. Click Cancel workflow in the top-right corner.

This will immediately halt all jobs in that workflow run.

Links and References

• GitHub Actions: Context and expression syntax
• GitHub Actions: Using workflow keywords
• GitHub Docs