Command to early-exit the job and set check conclusion

[ylemkimon]

Describe the enhancement
Currently to skip the rest of steps during a job, an if condition has to be added to all of steps or steps have to be moved to another job.

It'd be nice to have a command to early-exit (premature, prematurely, graceful, gracefully) (end, finish, terminate, termination, stop, halt, skip, cancel, discontinue, fail) the job during a step without failing the job:

::exit::

It'd be also nice to set the conclusion of early-exited job:

::exit::failure

(equivalent to exit 1)
or

::exit::neutral

(equivalent to exit 78 in Actions v1)
and other check conclusions.

This would help save build time for both GitHub and customers.

Additional information

Related StackOverflow and GitHub Community posts:

• How to fail a job in Github Actions?
• How to force to exit in Github Actions step
• How to write a GitHub Action with a neutral Check Run status
• How to perform an early clean exit of a job ?
• Early successful termination of job
• Github Action Skip Steps/Fall Through Syntax

Related issues:

• Has the setNeutral method been removed? toolkit#146
• https://github.com/veggiemonk/skip-commit

Other CIs:

• CircleCI: circleci-agent step halt
• Travis CI: travis_terminate
• AppVeyor: appveyor exit (Linux)
• Jenkins: currentBuild.result
• GitLab CI: exit 0

[a-tokyo]

This is really useful and is quite needed!

[remorses]

This is useful to not repeat the same if statement many times, you can instead do an early exit

[christian-kreuzberger-dtx]

This would be a great addition. Right now I have a pre-condition that I can only check in a bash-script, and I'm exiting with exit 1 for a purpose. However, in my PR it shows up as a failure :(

[bartlettroscoe]

I can't believe GHA does not support this. I guess you need to just implement and entire job as one big step run by your own driver script and then you can put whatever logic you want in that script to terminate early and with a zero exist (and a nice informational message). Is that the only current workaround for this?

GHA seems to be a new unique declarative language with somewhat limited functionality.

[user1689]

interested

[user1689]

Ref: https://github.blog/changelog/2023-09-21-github-actions-force-cancel-workflows/

[github-actions]

Thank you for your interest in the runner application and taking the time to provide your valuable feedback. We kindly ask you to redirect this feedback to the GitHub Community Support Forum which our team actively monitors and would be a better place to start a discussion for new feature requests in GitHub Actions. For more information on this policy please read our contribution guidelines. 😃

[ljharb]

This is a pretty user-hostile way to close this issue (as any bot closure is); this issue has been opened for 4 years, so even quite inactive monitoring should have surfaced it to your team.

[Jackenmen]

Either way, it would be good to get people to move their upvotes to some common discussion on the GitHub Actions product feedback discussion forum (putting a correct link here since the one given by the bot doesn't fully work) since that is in fact where they want all feature requests to go to nowadays.

As far as I can tell, there weren't any existing discussions there that would represent the same problem as this issue (there's https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/67407 but it's a question, not an enhancement request) so I made one here, mostly just copy-pasting the description from the original comment by ylemkinon with a few added remarks:
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/82744

[ljharb]

@joshmgross since you directed people here in actions/github-script#147 (comment), is there any chance this could be reopened, or that https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/82744 could be updated?

[silverqx]

Has anything changed about this? I'm searching for how to successfully exit the workflow in the middle to skip the rest of the steps. Is it possible?

[nsalfos]

Has anything changed about this? I'm searching for how to successfully exit the workflow in the middle to skip the rest of the steps. Is it possible?

i dont think anything changed in GHA iteself... i might be wrong tho...
there is a way but is not pretty... you have to put a conditional for each step after the one you want to skip.
like:

- name: I dont want anything to run after this
  id: boss-step
  run: |
    echo "skipnext=true" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT

- name: Some next step
  if : ( steps.boss-step.outputs.skipnext  != 'true' ) 
  run: |
    echo "will only run if skipnext is not true"
  
- name: Some other step
  if : ( steps.boss-step.outputs.skipnext  != 'true' ) 
  run: |
    echo "will only run if skipnext is not true"

and so on... for how many steps you have after your condition

[silverqx]

Ok, thx for reply, I have 27 steps to skip so this isn't a solution for my workflow. I will have to create a new workflow for this case.

[ArkadiuszMichalski]

I experienced the same problem myself. I am unable to terminate entire workflow as success without adding conditions in subsequent steps, which significantly obfuscates the entire code.

Closing this issue after a few years is not serious, considering how many people expect it.

[dirkf]

"For avoidance of doubt", he's surely saying that GH is not treating the issue seriously, rather than that closing the issue is not serious for the people who want the issue resolved.

[burhanyasar]

It might not fit all scenarios but in our similar too many if else case, it was possible to split the single pipeline to tag a new version on push and other pipelines would just run on a new tag, instead of checking an if statement.