Skip

How to skip some or all of the build steps

Ignore paths

Don’t run the workflow if changes were only made to certain paths, such as the docs directory.

Remember to use quotes so stop YAML evaluation of the ** glob.

Paths ignore attribute

Use paths-ignore attribute.

From example ignoring paths in the docs.

on:
  push:
    paths-ignore:
      - "docs/**"

If your docs directory has a lot of files in it that you edit often, then it is worth skipping that at least.

You don’t have to be thorough. Like I wouldn’t put your LICENSE file in there as that hardly changes.

Paths attribute

This will only build .js files and ignore others.

on:
  push:
    paths:
    - "**.js"

This is dangerous because you might leave your workflow file, Makefile, package files, etc. So can avoid being too restrictive accidentally by using the exclusion in the previous section instead.

Positive and negative paths

Or using a ! symbol in the paths attribute. The order matters. Here we include a directory and then exclude a subdirectory.

on:
  push:
    paths:
      - "sub-project/**"
      - "!sub-project/docs/**"

Skip step

Add a condition to skip if the commit message containts the phrase [ci skip].

jobs:
  deploy_docs:
    if: "!contains(github.event.commits[0].message, '[ci skip]')"

    steps:
      # ...