It's a real pain to disable automatically disabled workflows

[jsoref]

Why are you starting this discussion?

Product Feedback

What GitHub Actions topic or product is this about?

Workflow Deployment

Discussion Details

I have forked thousands of repositories. Many of them have scheduled workflows. Some number of days before 60 days of inactivity an email is sent with:

[GitHub] The "CodeQL" workflow in jsoref/traefik will be disabled soon

GitHub Actions scheduled workflow

Scheduled workflows are disabled automatically after 60 days of repository inactivity. Learn more about disabling and enabling workflows.
You can prevent CodeQL from being disabled on the workflows page.
Manage workflow

That link leads to:

This scheduled workflow is disabled because there hasn't been activity in this repository for at least 60 days. Enable this workflow to resume scheduled runs. [ Enable workflow ]

For any repository to which I might make occasional contributions, that means that each time I fetch from upstream, the workflow resumes for some period of time and then disables later.

Let's say that I don't want the workflow to run later, e.g. when I refresh the repository (which I do). I have to click some link to get to this page, then I have to click [ Enable workflow ],

... then I have to click the ellipsis, then I have to click Disable workflow

That's not terribly ergonomic.

But, for something that GitHub presumably wants, this seems like a really awkward path...

Repositories that use schedule workflows will often have half a dozen or more schedule workflow files which means that even if I wanted to stop all of them, I have to repeat this very awkward process.

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[reukiodo]

I have the opposite issue and need to re-enable workflows one-by-one because they disable (on my own runner!) over time, even when there are no repo updates, the build process takes into account new OS versions, new package version, etc to constantly stay updated creating our containers to address CVEs.

[reukiodo]

Thanks! I'll need to put this on all my repos.

But how does this workflow itself not ever get disabled?

[jsoref]

Personally, I just have a scheduled workflow with a key that pushes to a branch. It keeps my repairing from going "idle". In my case, the action performs a regression test and publishes its results.

[marcindulak]

Let me back it off (and remove the my probably misleading comment) - I think the idea of of enabling the workflow pre-empively may not work if gh api call does not reset the workflow 60 days timer, but I'll know that only in less then 2 months.

https://github.com/liskin/gh-workflow-keepalive exists, so this approach may work.

For reference, the idea was to keep enabling non-disabled workflows

gh api "repos/${GITHUB_REPOSITORY}/actions/workflows" --paginate  --jq '.workflows[] | [.id, .state, .path] | @tsv' |
while IFS=$'\t' read -r workflow_id workflow_state workflow_path; do
  echo "Found ${workflow_path} state: ${workflow_state}"
  if [ "${workflow_state}" != "disabled_manually" ]; then
    gh api --method PUT \
      "repos/${GITHUB_REPOSITORY}/actions/workflows/${workflow_id}/enable"
    echo "Enabled: ${workflow_path}"
  fi
done

[DireDoch]

This is interesting mhhh

[film42]

If you want to do this for free accounts, fine. But why does this happen to accounts paying for services? Ridiculous.