How To Schedule Github Actions Workflow On A Specific Branch For

In today’s fast-paced development cycles, automating repetitive tasks like releases is critical to maintaining efficiency and reducing human error. GitHub Actions, a powerful CI/CD tool integrated directly with GitHub, allows you to automate workflows—including scheduled releases on specific branches. Whether you’re shipping weekly updates, monthly patches, or critical hotfixes, scheduling releases ensures consistency and frees up your team to focus on development. This guide will walk you through creating a GitHub Actions workflow that triggers automatically on a schedule for a specific branch, configuring the release process, testing the workflow, and troubleshooting common issues. By the end, you’ll have a robust, automated release pipeline tailored to your project’s needs. GitHub Actions is a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) platform built into GitHub.

It lets you automate tasks like building, testing, and deploying code directly from your GitHub repository. Workflows are defined in YAML files stored in the .github/workflows directory of your repo, and they trigger based on events (e.g., pushes, pull requests, or schedules). Before you begin, ensure you have the following: To schedule a release, you’ll use the schedule trigger, which runs workflows at specified times using cron syntax. Additionally, you’ll need to target a specific branch to ensure releases only run from that branch (e.g., release/main). Communities for your favorite technologies.

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Bring the best of human thought and AI automation together at your work. Running jobs on specific branches with GitHub Actions is a common scenario implemented by DevOps and SRE professionals. This allows you to control which branches trigger specific jobs within your workflows. This can be important for maintaining efficient CI/CD processes, especially if you want tests to run on every branch while restricting deployment actions to only the main branch. This article explains how to configure several different methods of running GitHub Actions workflow jobs on specific branches in the repo. One of the key features of GitHub Actions is the ability to fine-tune when and where your workflows run by setting up branch-specific triggers.

This functionality helps with maintaining an organized and efficient CI/CD pipeline, as it allows you to control the execution of workflows based on the branch involved in the event. Whether you’re pushing code, creating pull requests, or merging branches, you can define rules that determine which branches should trigger specific workflows. Branch-specific triggers provide several benefits: Filtering workflows to run only on specific branches is a fundamental feature of GitHub Actions. This allows you to control when and where your workflows are triggered, ensuring that jobs only run in the intended branches. By doing so, you can maintain a clean, efficient CI/CD process tailored to your development needs.

Branch filtering in GitHub Actions is configured using the branches keyword within the on field of your workflow YAML file. This configuration dictates that the workflow should only trigger on specified branches. You can configure your workflows to run when specific activity on GitHub happens, at a scheduled time, or when an event outside of GitHub occurs. Workflow triggers are events that cause a workflow to run. For more information about how to use workflow triggers, see Triggering a workflow. Some events have multiple activity types.

For these events, you can specify which activity types will trigger a workflow run. For more information about what each activity type means, see Webhook events and payloads. Not all webhook events trigger workflows. Runs your workflow when branch protection rules in the workflow repository are changed. For more information about branch protection rules, see About protected branches. For information about the branch protection rule APIs, see Objects in the GraphQL API documentation or REST API endpoints for branches and their settings.

Posted on Oct 2, 2024 • Edited on Oct 7, 2024 • Originally published at cicube.io You will be able to use the schedule event in GitHub Actions to trigger the execution of your workflows at selected times based on the cron schedule that you will define. In fact, that could help with automating things to happen on a regular schedule without any action on your end. Also remember that workflows are bound to the default branch. So, if you're scheduling something, make sure it's on the right branch. If for some reason a scheduled workflow isn't running anymore, that could be either because the repository has become inactive, or else the last person who edited the cron schedule has been removed from...

A quick fix for this would be to have someone with access update the cron settings. Cron uses a series of five values to define time: You can utilize all manner of neat tools that help generate your cron syntax and confirm what time it will run. Here's a decent one: crontab guru, and here are some crontab guru examples to help you get started with your first few entries. How to automatically trigger GitHub Actions workflows To learn more about workflows and triggering workflows, see Workflows.

When you use the repository's GITHUB_TOKEN to perform tasks, events triggered by the GITHUB_TOKEN, with the exception of workflow_dispatch and repository_dispatch, will not create a new workflow run. This prevents you from accidentally creating recursive workflow runs. For example, if a workflow run pushes code using the repository's GITHUB_TOKEN, a new workflow will not run even when the repository contains a workflow configured to run when push events occur. For more information, see Use GITHUB_TOKEN for authentication in workflows. If you do want to trigger a workflow from within a workflow run, you can use a GitHub App installation access token or a personal access token instead of GITHUB_TOKEN to trigger events that... If you use a GitHub App, you'll need to create a GitHub App and store the app ID and private key as secrets.

For more information, see Making authenticated API requests with a GitHub App in a GitHub Actions workflow. If you use a personal access token, you'll need to create a personal access token and store it as a secret. For more information about creating a personal access token, see Managing your personal access tokens. For more information about storing secrets, see Using secrets in GitHub Actions.

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