Older workflow runs overriding newer deployments when pushing multiple commits quickly

[genetbeneberu825-png]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Bug

💬 Feature/Topic Area

ARC (Actions Runner Controller)

Discussion Details

Hey everyone,

Ran into a massive headache with our GitHub Actions deployment pipeline today and wanted to see if anyone has a clean workaround.

Our workflow is set up to build and deploy our frontend to AWS S3 whenever code is pushed to the main branch. Today, a teammate pushed a hotfix, and then immediately pushed a quick typo fix about 30 seconds later.

Because the first run (the hotfix) took slightly longer to build due to a cold cache, it ended up finishing after the typo fix run. This completely overrode the typo fix on the live site with the older build.

Obviously, having older commits override newer ones in production is a nightmare. Is there a built-in way in GitHub Actions to automatically kill or queue older runs if a newer push happens?

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[biruk-arch]

Oh man, the classic deployment race condition. I had this exact nightmare burn down a production release before we fixed it.

The good news is you don’t need to write any complex scripts to fix this. GitHub actually added a built-in feature specifically for this scenario called concurrency.

You can group your workflow runs together and tell GitHub to automatically cancel any older, in-progress runs the second a new push comes in.

The Fix
All you need to do is add a concurrency block right at the top of your workflow YAML file (below your on: triggers).

Here is exactly how to set it up:

name: Deploy Frontend

on:
push:
branches:
- main

This is the magic snippet right here 👇
concurrency:
group: ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.ref }}
cancel-in-progress: true

jobs:
deploy:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Checkout code
uses: actions/checkout@v4
# ... rest of your build and deploy steps

group: This names the bottleneck. By using ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.ref }}, you are ensuring that this rule only applies to runs of this specific workflow on this specific branch.

cancel-in-progress: true: This is the killer setting. The moment you push Commit B, GitHub looks at the group name. If it sees Commit A is still running under that same group name, it immediately terminates Commit A on the spot and lets Commit B run.

💡 One quick warning: Only use cancel-in-progress: true on workflows where it's safe to interrupt the steps mid-way (like builds or tests). If your workflow actually alters database states or state files (like Terraform), you might want to leave cancel-in-progress out so they just queue up sequentially instead of cutting off mid-migration.

Drop that into your YAML and you won't have to worry about out-of-order deployments again!