Ability to restart individual failed GitHub Actions jobs while workflow is still running

[janpio]

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https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/4278 and actions/runner#432 added the ability to re-start individual jobs, instead of having to re-run all the jobs in a workflow when one fails. That already was a great improvement and avoided a lot of wasteful CI minutes.

But now we still have to wait for all jobs in a workflow to finish before we can do that. If a quick job fails because of some temporary or flaky error, we have to wait for the one super slow job to finish - and only then can we click the button to restart the job that failed. That leads to us sitting in front of GH Actions tabs, waiting for the workflow to fail fully. If we could restart individual jobs earlier, that would be much more efficient.

Please let us instantly restart failed jobs while the rest of the workflow is still in progress.

(Written while waiting for a slow job to finish so I can restart a fast one that failed 10 minutes ago because of some network problem)

[lobsterkatie]

@janpio Thanks for splitting this off into its own discussion!

I said this in the original discussion, but while being able to re-run the job as soon as it fails would be the best solution, I'd settle for a "Cancel workflow & rerun failed jobs" button.

As it stands, I have to do the cancel and rerun steps individually, which would be annoying but ultimately fine if cancellation were instantaneous. It isn't, though, so instead I have to wait around for the cancellation to take before I can then rerun the jobs (which is in and of itself a harder process than it needs to be, as @melissachang does an excellent job of describing here).

[janpio]

That might be an alternative approach, indeed.

In our case that would not be a great solution though, as cancelling the long-running jobs (which would succeed when just left alone) would again make the total runtime of the tests longer because they have to start over.

A third option could be a Rerun all failed jobs (while other jobs are still running). That might indeed be a good option as well, additionally to the "restart individual failed jobs" I suggested originally.

[lobsterkatie]

Yes, you make a good point about the timing. No question that being able to rerun some or all failing jobs while others are still running is the best solution.

[Felixoid]

Our CI runs 6 hours on average. Each test task runs for 1h. Around 100+ of total jobs.

Imaging canceling running tests (and losing all the CPU time spent) because of one network error or a dead spot EC2 instance.

As much as it's a workaround, for our case, it's not even close to a solution, but to a total disaster. As @janpio stated

[idoudali]

In our team we are in a similar position.
In our CI we have a number of long-running jobs ( > 1hours ) , canceling and restarting all of them would lead to significant lost compute

[emmahsax]

We should have the ability to:

• rerun any job before the whole workflow is complete
• rerun any jobs via select checkboxes, versus being able to run only all or all failed
• rerun any successful job... yes sometimes it can be helpful to rerun successful jobs

[emmahsax]

Based on the fact that this discussion has been open for almost 18 months, has this many people interested in this feature, and this ticket wouldn't hurt anybody.... I think it shows where the dev teams' priorities lie.

[Elio-FairlyMade]

Up on this subject
Waiting slow jobs to complete before relaunching the job that fails is really painful.

[thimios]

+1

[nebuk89]

Thanks for this feedback! We are thinking on this and also about what primitives we need (how exit codes/status need to evolve) in this area. It's not something we are doing right now, but I really appreciate the engagement and please keep voting this up if you are interested <3

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[Tang-Haojin]

+1 especially for self-hosted runners because the network and machine status might be more unstable.

[nadim-az]

+1, @nebuk89 this really slows down build time and is just poor developer experience

[johnoliv]

+1

[YevhS]

+1

[canopatrick]

+1

[afsangujarati93]

I was having the same issue. Most of my jobs are long running jobs and it wasn't possible for me to cancel the entire workflow if one of the jobs failed. I needed a way to retrigger the workflow which I know I could achieve if it was triggered as an individual workflow.

So I ended up implemented workflow dispatch and wait (https://github.com/marketplace/actions/workflow-dispatch-and-wait). I have a workflow orchestrator that dispatches the individual workflow and waits for them to finish. I have an option to cancel the individual workflow or re-run them.

This isn't exactly ideal but gets me half way through what I needed. This might not work if you have dependent jobs and stuff.

[fuzzlebuck]

Please do this, so annoying having to wait for all jobs to finish, just wasting time.

[Dzoge]

I'm surprised this is still an issue, and we need to wait for that one long-running job to complete until we can restart the failed ones. Please look into this, it's quite frustrating.

[eduebury159]

+1

[nvergez]

+1

[Sherlouk]

Joining the bandwagon here, +1. We've had to split our workflows up into multiple files as a long-running job (~30 minutes) blocks us from retrying a short, but occasionally flakey, job (which is a pre-req in a chain of subsequent jobs). We have to wait for the full job to finish just wasting ages.

[aslichampion]

Also joining to show some love for this request, would be a great quality of life improvement 🚀

[MichaIng]

Similarly, if would be great to be able to cancel a single job instead of the whole workflow. Does it make sense to create an own topic from this? Somehow belongs together to me 🙂.

[evan-d-lauer]

+1

[mikopp6]

+1

[eligazes-maximallearning]

+1 cmon, add the feature, its 2026 we are not asking a human to grace us with his presence

[RaviTejaKomma]

+1

[cam-from-ditto]

+1

[wladioh]

+1

[tylerkoster21]

I completely agree with this suggestion. If a small job fails early because of a temporary network issue or a flaky dependency, having to wait for the entire workflow to finish before restarting it feels unnecessary. Being able to retry failed jobs immediately while the rest of the workflow is still running would save time, reduce idle waiting, and make CI pipelines much more efficient, especially for larger projects with long-running jobs.

It's one of those workflow improvements that seems small but could make a noticeable difference for developers who use GitHub Actions every day.

Just like having quick access to the Quran makes daily reading easier, keeping Surah Yaseen available through a Surah Yaseen PDF download is a simple convenience that helps many people stay consistent with their routine.

[Tutez64]

+1

[kjblanchard]

+1

[benjamin-heasly]

+1

[kalmenius]

+1 (plenty of other CI/CD platforms e.g. Buildkite support this)