How do I handle a job which won't work, but I want to get changes into main?

[rfalanga]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Workflow Deployment

Discussion Details

I've got a GitHub workflow file, with 2 jobs in it. One is for building the application, and the other is for deploying it to my hosting company. The build job works fine, but the deployment job fails. However, I'd really like to get the changes that this PR represents merged into the main branch. But this is blocking the whole works. And it has held it up for a week. I've thought that maybe I could cancel the PR, then mark the GitHub Workflow as disabled. Then re-issue the PR, get the necessary changes into main and research how I can get the deployment of my web application onto the hosting company.

Is that the way I should do it, or is there a better way?

[jothirmoysarker]

While your proposed workaround would technically achieve your goal, it involves a lot of manual friction and temporarily kills your build testing too.
Instead of disabling the entire workflow globally, you can modify the workflow file just within your PR branch to bypass the failure.
or ,
The simplest trick is to open your workflow file in your PR branch and simply comment out the deployment job. (or you can wait for someone more experienced to give you more suitable solution because this all I got for now)

[EgglezosHub]

@jothirmoysarker is exactly right. If you turn off the whole workflow, you lose your build tests. The fastest fix is to just comment out the deploy job in your PR branch so you can merge.
But honestly, the best long term fix is to tell GitHub to only run the deploy job on the main branch. You usually do not want PR branches deploying anyway.
Just add this one line to your deploy job:

deploy:
    needs: build
    if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/main'

If you add that and commit it, GitHub will just skip the deploy step for now. Your PR will turn green, you can merge it, and then you can figure out the hosting problem later.
Hope this helps you out!