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Work Avoidance in GitHub Actions

Apply work avoidance patterns to skip unnecessary CI/CD operations.

Skip Before Execute

Detect unchanged content, cached builds, and irrelevant paths before running expensive operations.

When to Apply

Work avoidance is valuable in GitHub Actions when:

  • Distribution workflows push files to many repositories
  • Release automation bumps versions without content changes
  • Scheduled jobs run regardless of whether work exists
  • Monorepo builds trigger on any change but only need subset builds

Implementation Patterns

Pattern Operator Manual Engineering Pattern
Skip version-only changes Content Comparison Volatile Field Exclusion
Skip unchanged paths Path Filtering N/A (native GitHub feature)
Skip cached builds Cache-Based Skip Cache-Based Skip

Quick Reference

Check for Meaningful Changes

- name: Check for meaningful changes
  id: check
  run: |
    # Strip version line before comparing
    strip_version() {
      sed '/^version:.*# x-release-please-version$/d' "$1"
    }

    SOURCE=$(strip_version "source/CONFIG.md")
    TARGET=$(git show HEAD:CONFIG.md 2>/dev/null | \
      sed '/^version:.*# x-release-please-version$/d' || echo "")

    if [ "$SOURCE" = "$TARGET" ]; then
      echo "skip=true" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
    else
      echo "skip=false" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
    fi

- name: Distribute file
  if: steps.check.outputs.skip != 'true'
  run: ./distribute.sh

Path-Based Filtering

on:
  push:
    paths:
      - 'src/**'
      - 'package.json'
    paths-ignore:
      - '**.md'
      - 'docs/**'

Cache-Based Skip

- name: Check cache
  id: cache
  uses: actions/cache@v4
  with:
    path: dist/
    key: build-${{ hashFiles('src/**') }}

- name: Build
  if: steps.cache.outputs.cache-hit != 'true'
  run: npm run build

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