How to Cancel Running Workflows and Only Run the Latest with GitHub Actions

Introduction

Let’s say you have a GitHub Actions workflow set up under the following conditions:

• A workflow deploys changes to the Staging environment whenever there’s a merge into the develop branch
• There’s only one Staging environment
• You want to conserve your GitHub Actions usage quota as much as possible

In such scenarios, it’s often desirable to cancel any currently running workflows and only run the most recent one. GitHub Actions provides a feature that allows this behavior, and this post documents how to configure it.

Configuration

You can achieve this by setting cancel-in-progress to true within the concurrency key. The concurrency field allows you to control the parallel execution of workflows or jobs.

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - develop

concurrency:
  group: deploy-${{ github.ref }}
  cancel-in-progress: true

The group field controls parallel execution within the same group name. In the example above, using deploy-${{ github.ref }} as the group name allows you to manage concurrency per branch.

You can also set concurrency at the job level:

jobs:
  some-job:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    concurrency:
      group: job-something
      cancel-in-progress: true

Conclusion

With this setup, you can avoid unnecessary workflow runs and save on your GitHub Actions usage quota.

For more details on concurrency, refer to the official documentation:

Control the concurrency of workflows and jobs - GitHub Docs

Run a single job at a time.

docs.github.com