Path filters for org-level workflow rulesets

[roryabraham]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Workflow Configuration

Discussion Details

The Require workflows to pass before merging Ruleset is very powerful. You can use it to define a PR check workflow once, and then enforce it on pull requests in every repo in your org.

At Expensify, we currently use this to enforce certain security practices in our GitHub Actions and Workflows. I'd love to expand this to run other kinds of checks globally:

• shellcheck
• typescript typechecking
• linting
• etc...

This would potentially allow us to centralize lots of our configuration, making configuration easier and promoting better code consistency/quality across our org.

However, there's an important limitation which makes this less appealing than it might otherwise be. From the docs:

Ruleset workflows support using the pull_request, pull_request_target and merge_group events. As a result, you must specify one or more of these events in the on: section of the workflow for the workflow to be run by a ruleset.

Any filters you specify for the supported events are ignored - for example, branches, branches-ignore, paths, types and so on. The workflow is only triggered, and is always triggered, by the default activity types of the supported events.

I'm sure there was some reason for this, but it means that every workflow runs on every PR, even in contexts where it doesn't make sense. Currently, we accept this cost for our GitHub Workflow checks. But it's inconvenient (particularly during GitHub incidents) because even if it's pretty quick, the workflow needs to run and we must to manually examine the diff to see if the checks need to run.

If the paths filter worked for workflows triggered by Rulesets, we could skip workflows entirely on PRs where they aren't relevant.

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