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Job on specific branch

Useful snippets and references to help you building workflow in GitHub Actions.

note

Inspired from this stackoverflow thread.

How to run job only on specific branch with GitHub Actions.​

With GitHub Actions, you are able to put if conditionals at job level.

info

Inspired from the GitHub Actions documentation.

This workflow which runs the job test on every push, but only runs deploy on the main branch.

name: Conditional workflow

on: push

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Execute tests
        run: exit 0

  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    needs: test

    if: ${{ github.ref == 'refs/heads/main' }}
    steps:
      - name: Deploy app
        run: exit 0

An alternative solution if you prefer to have separate workflows:

  • The first workflow runs for every branch except main. In this workflow you run tests only.
first-workflow.yaml
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - "*"
      - "!main"
  • The second workflow runs for just main and runs both your tests and deploys if the tests were successfully passed.
second-workflow.yaml
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main