Troubleshooting required status checks

If you have a check and a status with the same name, and you select that name as a required status check, both the check and the status are required. For more information, see "Checks."

After you enable required status checks, your branch may need to be up-to-date with the base branch before merging. This ensures that your branch has been tested with the latest code from the base branch. If your branch is out of date, you'll need to merge the base branch into your branch. For more information, see "About protected branches."

You won't be able to push local changes to a protected branch until all required status checks pass. Instead, you'll receive an error message similar to the following.

remote: error: GH006: Protected branch update failed for refs/heads/main.
remote: error: Required status check "ci-build" is failing

Conflicts between head commit and test merge commit

Sometimes, the results of the status checks for the test merge commit and head commit will conflict. If the test merge commit has a status, the test merge commit must pass. Otherwise, the status of the head commit must pass before you can merge the branch. For more information about test merge commits, see "Pulls."

Handling skipped but required checks

Sometimes a required status check is skipped on pull requests due to path filtering. For example, a Node.JS test will be skipped on a pull request that just fixes a typo in your README file and makes no changes to the JavaScript and TypeScript files in the scripts directory.

If this check is required and it gets skipped, then the check's status is shown as pending, because it's required. In this situation you won't be able to merge the pull request.

Example

In this example you have a workflow that's required to pass.

name: ci
on:
  pull_request:
    paths:
      - 'scripts/**'
      - 'middleware/**'
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    strategy:
      matrix:
        node-version: [12.x, 14.x, 16.x]
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Use Node.js $
      uses: actions/setup-node@v2
      with:
        node-version: $
        cache: 'npm'
    - run: npm ci
    - run: npm run build --if-present
    - run: npm test

If someone submits a pull request that changes a markdown file in the root of the repository, then the workflow above won't run at all because of the path filtering. As a result you won't be able to merge the pull request. You would see the following status on the pull request:

You can fix this by creating a generic workflow, with the same name, that will return true in any case similar to the workflow below :

name: ci
on:
  pull_request:
    paths-ignore:
      - 'scripts/**'
      - 'middleware/**'
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - run: 'echo "No build required" '

Now the checks will always pass whenever someone sends a pull request that doesn't change the files listed under paths in the first workflow.