Behn's Ramblings | How to skip required checks in GitHub Actions

As mentioned in Speeding up Jest on GitHub Actions, I've been working on a project at work recently which is seeing us migrate from CircleCI to GitHub Actions. One of the requirements that cropped up was to skip required checks in a workflow which doesn't always need to run, but does need to be run in some cases.

Unfortunately, GitHub Actions doesn't have a built-in way to skip required checks based on a condition - if you use the inbuilt path filter, it will still as a pending check, therefore it doesn't meet the merge requirements. The fix is to add a new job to your workflow which controls downstream job runs based on a file match condition.

The setup

Say we have the following workflow, which runs tests in my internal/ directory:

name: Go Tests
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
  pull_request:
    types: [opened, reopened, synchronize]
 
concurrency:
  group: ${{ github.ref }}-${{ github.workflow }}
  cancel-in-progress: ${{ github.ref != 'refs/heads/main' }}
 
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest # This can be changed to a larger runner
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Get CPU count
        run: echo "CPUS=$(nproc 2>/dev/null || echo 2)" >> $GITHUB_ENV
      - name: Install Go
        uses: actions/setup-go@v5
        with:
          go-version: '1.22.5'
      - name: Run go tests
        run: go run gotest.tools/gotestsum@latest \
          --packages"./..." \
          --junitfile junit.xml

In order to conditionally control downstream jobs, and mark the workflow as passed if the later jobs aren't required, we can add a new job to the workflow:

...
jobs:
  prepare:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    outputs:
      go-changed: ${{ steps.changed.outputs.go }}
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          fetch-depth: 50
      - uses: dorny/paths-filter@v3
        id: changed
        with:
          filters: |
            go:
              - 'go.{mod|sum}'
              - 'internal/**/*'
 
  test:
    needs:
      - prepare
    if: needs.prepare.outputs.go-changed == 'true'
    ...

Once added, you can then enforce that the 'Go Tests' workflow runs as part of your required checks, but only if the internal/ directory has changed.

Behn Hayhoe

How to skip required checks in GitHub Actions

The setup