GitHub Action: Workflow Run Queue

If the same workflow is already running from a previous commit, wait for it to finish

Why?

Workflows run on every commit asynchronously, this is fine for most cases, however, you might want to wait for a previous commit workflow to finish before running another one, some example use-cases:

• Deployment workflows
• Terraform workflows
• Database Migrations

Usage

Workflow-Level Concurrency (Default)

.github/workflows/my-workflow.yml

jobs:
  xyz:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: ahmadnassri/action-workflow-queue@v1

      # only runs additional steps if there is no other instance of `my-workflow.yml` currently running

Job-Level Concurrency

For more granular control, you can specify a job name to check concurrency only for that specific job within the workflow:

.github/workflows/deployment-workflow.yml

jobs:
  deploy-staging:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: ahmadnassri/action-workflow-queue@v1
        with:
          job-name: "deploy-staging"
      # only waits if another workflow run has the "deploy-staging" job currently running
      - name: Deploy to staging
        run: echo "Deploying to staging..."

  deploy-production:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: ahmadnassri/action-workflow-queue@v1
        with:
          job-name: "deploy-production"
      # only waits if another workflow run has the "deploy-production" job currently running
      - name: Deploy to production
        run: echo "Deploying to production..."

  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      # No queue action - tests can run concurrently
      - name: Run tests
        run: echo "Running tests..."

In this example:

• deploy-staging jobs from different workflow runs cannot run concurrently
• deploy-production jobs from different workflow runs cannot run concurrently
• deploy-staging and deploy-production jobs CAN run concurrently with each other
• test jobs can always run concurrently

Inputs

input	required	default	description
github-token	❌	github.token	The GitHub token used to call the GitHub API
timeout	❌	600000	timeout before we stop trying (in milliseconds)
delay	❌	10000	delay between status checks (in milliseconds)
job-name	❌	null	Specific job name to check concurrency for (optional - defaults to workflow-level concurrency)

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Author: Ahmad Nassri • Twitter: @AhmadNassri