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Using conditions to control job execution

Prevent a job from running unless your conditions are met.

Note: GitHub-hosted runners are not currently supported on GitHub Enterprise Server. You can see more information about planned future support on the GitHub public roadmap.

Overview

Note: A job that is skipped will report its status as "Success". It will not prevent a pull request from merging, even if it is a required check.

You can use the jobs.<job_id>.if conditional to prevent a job from running unless a condition is met. You can use any supported context and expression to create a conditional. For more information on which contexts are supported in this key, see "Contexts."

Note: The jobs.<job_id>.if condition is evaluated before jobs.<job_id>.strategy.matrix is applied.

When you use expressions in an if conditional, you can, optionally, omit the ${{ }} expression syntax because GitHub Actions automatically evaluates the if conditional as an expression. However, this exception does not apply everywhere.

You must always use the ${{ }} expression syntax or escape with '', "", or () when the expression starts with !, since ! is reserved notation in YAML format. For example:

if: ${{ ! startsWith(github.ref, 'refs/tags/') }}

For more information, see "Expressions."

Example: Only run job for specific repository

This example uses if to control when the production-deploy job can run. It will only run if the repository is named octo-repo-prod and is within the octo-org organization. Otherwise, the job will be marked as skipped.

YAML
name: example-workflow
on: [push]
jobs:
  production-deploy:
    if: github.repository == 'octo-org/octo-repo-prod'
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v3
        with:
          node-version: '14'
      - run: npm install -g bats

On a skipped job, you should see "This check was skipped."

Note: In some parts of the workflow you cannot use environment variables. Instead you can use contexts to access the value of an environment variable. For more information, see "Variables."