Cancel Superseded Workflow Runs Action

This is a Github Action that will reject or cancel workflow runs in waiting state which have been superseded by later changes based on previous commits within a branch (main by default).

When should I use this?

1. You use Github workflows to deploy code. Specifically you use Trunk based development to allow each PR merge to progress through your deployment pipeline.
2. You have manual approval enabled in some part of your deployment workflow, resulting in potentially multiple workflow runs stuck in waiting state
3. You want the ability to automatically reject or cancel workflow runs which have been superseded by more recent changes

Concretely suppose PR A was merged and progressed through the pipeline until it reached a deployment to a production environment which requires manual approval. This workflow run is now in waiting state. Subsequently a bug in A was discovered and fixed in PR B which also got to the manual approval step. Now we have two workflows in waiting state. Eventually, the workflow associated with B is approved and deployed. In this case workflow run A is effectively superseded - i.e. B has all the changes of A and some additional fixes and that A should never really be deployed to production. However, the workflow run for A will stick around in waiting state until the default (and apparently unconfigurable) timeout of 30 days. Apart from being an eye-sore, this also leaves open the opportunity to accidentally approve the workflow for A which could overwrite the changes in B and unleash a bug in production 😰!

This action could be added at the end of the deployment workflow to determine all the workflow runs for a particular workflow which match the definition of superseded above. i.e.:

1. Workflow runs triggered off the same branch but later commit than the currently approved workflow run
2. Workflow run is currently in waiting state

These workflow runs will be subject to cancellation (or rejection if preferred).

Alternatively this could be added into a dispatch workflow to periodically cleanup old workflow runs

How to use it?

From deployment workflow

jobs:
...
  deploy-prod:
    name: Deploy Prod
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment: prod # Here prod has manual approval required
    permissions:
      contents: read
      id-token: write
    steps:
      ...
      - name: Run SUCCESS script
        run: echo success

  cancel-superseded-workflows:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    if: ${{ always() && contains(join(needs.*.result, ','), 'success') }}
    needs: [deploy-prod]
    steps:
      - uses: viveklak/cancel-workflows@v1.1.1
        with:
          # workflow-run-id will be set to current workflow run ID
          # workflow-run-id: ${{ inputs.workflow-run-id }}
          limit-to-previous-successful-run-commit: "true"
          # Flip this when you are ready to cancel workflows
          dry-run: "true"

As dispatch workflow

name: cancel-superseded-workflows

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      workflow-run-id:
        type: string
        description: The currently preferred workflow run to supersede previous workflows runs with
        required: true
      last-successful-run-id:
        type: string
        required: false
        description: The workflow run to stop at when looking for cancelable workflows. Defaults to most recent successful workflow otherwise.
      dry-run:
        type: string
        required: false
        description: Don't actually cancel but just print the workflows to be cancelled. Default is true.
        # Flip this when you are ready to cancel workflows
        default: "true"

jobs:
  cancel-superseded-workflows:
    name: Cancel Superseded Workflows
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    concurrency: cancel-superseded-workflows
    steps:
      - uses: viveklak/cancel-workflows@v1.1.1
        with:
          workflow-run-id: ${{ inputs.workflow-run-id }}
          limit-to-previous-successful-run-commit: "true"
          last-successful-run-id: ${{ inputs.last-successful-run-id }}
          dry-run: ${{ inputs.dry-run }}

Acknowledgement

This Action was inspired heavily by https://github.com/styfle/cancel-workflow-action. By the authors' own admission, that action is probably now obsoleted by job and workflow level concurrency control, but the above use case is still under-served. I decided to adapt this action to the above use case.