Thank you! That did the trick, however I’m stuck on another issue. I want my next job (deploy) to wait for database to finish before running, but if database is skipped then run it immediately. Any idea how to do that?

I found a “hack”. I just moved the if statement you provided to every command inside of the database job instead of at the job level if that makes sense

@nahtnam,

I recommend you to use needs and Job status check functions to do that.
In your case, you can try like as below:

jobs:
  . . .
database:

name: job database

. . .
deploy:

name: job deploy

needs: database

if: always()

. . .

In this way:

• If job database is executed, job deploy will run after database completes, regardless of whether database is success or failure.
• If job database is skipped, job deploy also will run.

That worked, thank you so much! Just wondering, where did you learn all of this? The docs are kind of hard to sort through, so I was wondering if there was another guide or something

@nahtnam,

In fact, the official documentation has provided a quite detailed guidance of these knowledge and technologies. The appropriate engineering team also will update the documentation in time for the new features, or improve some descriptions in the documentation so that readers can better understand the relevant knowledge.

You can pay more attention to these documents, and learn almost all the technical guidance about GitHub Actions.
Of course, if you have any questions or troubles on GitHub Actions, please feel free to contact us. We will provide you with help and support as mush as we can.

Thank you, I think its just a lot of information all in one place so its a little overwhelming. Also I am facing an issue.

So I made a change to my prisma folder (database) and for some reason my database job was still skipped:

check_database:
    outputs:
      run_job: ${{ steps.check_files.outputs.run_job }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    needs: test
    if: github.ref == 'refs/heads/master'
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          fetch-depth: 2
  - name: check modified files
    id: check_files
    run: |
      echo "=============== list modified files ==============="
      git diff --name-only HEAD^ HEAD

      echo "========== check paths of modified files =========="
      git diff --name-only HEAD^ HEAD > files.txt
      while IFS= read -r file
      do
        echo $file
        if [[ $file = prisma/* ]]; then
          echo "This modified file is under the 'prisma' folder."
          echo "::set-output name=run_job::true"
          break
        else
          echo "::set-output name=run_job::false"
        fi
      done < files.txt

database:

runs-on: ubuntu-latest

needs: check_database

if: needs.check.outputs.run_job == 'true' && github.ref == 'refs/heads/master'

env:

DATABASE_URL: ${{ secrets.PRODUCTION_DATABASE_URL }}

steps:

- uses: actions/checkout@v2

- name: Use Node.js 12.x

uses: actions/setup-node@v1

with:

node-version: '12.x'

- run: npm ci

- run: npx prisma generate

- run: npx prisma migrate up --experimental

- run: npx ts-node prisma/_seeds/production/index.ts

In the check_database job, I see this output

=============== list modified files ===============
// bunch of files here
========== check paths of modified files ==========
prisma/_seeds/development/index.ts
This modified file is under the 'prisma' folder.

so it looks like it is recognizing the change but for some reason the database job is still skipped.

@nahtnam,

You are referencing to an inconsistent job id in the if conditional, the expression syntax is “needs.<job id>.outputs.<output name>”.

needs: check_database
if: needs.check.outputs.run_job == 'true' && ...

it should be “check_database”, not “check”, you do not set job “database” needs any one job which named “check”, and there is no job “check” in your workflow.
So, please correct your workflow like as below, and try again:

needs: check_database
if: needs.check_database.outputs.run_job == 'true' && ...

My mistake, thank you so much!

@nahtnam,
You’re welcome. And glad that my suggestions can help you solve the problems.
If you have any other questions about this ticket, feel free to tell me.

::set-output name=run_job::false

Can you please explain this segment ???

@tbhaxor,

::set-output name=run_job::false

This is setting an output of a step and can be used in the subsequent steps.

To view more details, you can see:

• Setting an output parameter
• jobs.<jobs_id>.outputs

I'm trying to do it like this but I cannot make it work:

  Flow_A_:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    if: contains(github.event.commits[0].modified[*], 'data/')

    steps:
      - name: Echo A
        run: |
          echo "This is Flow A"

The return value of the contains(...) function is always false and there is no way to list the array to check the values.

As for now, using @PaulRBerg solution is the best way to do it