Providing a mechanism to restart a PR workflow

[yarusome]

PR workflows can fail for unexpected external causes, e.g. when checkout fails, but there is no way to restart the workflow by the contributors.

Note: Adding the manual trigger workflow_dispatch might enable abuse of resources, so it needs some other way.

[bsmth]

Thanks for raising this one. I think adding workflow_dispatch for check redirects might be okay, happy to hear other opinions. Would it be sufficient to let us know in a chat (Discord) for a low/no-tech solution to this?

I've restarted the failed job in this case, anyway 😄

[yarusome]

Thanks for the restarting!

[yin1999]

Hey @yarusome. IMO, adding an extra mechanism to trigger the workflow might not be necessary.

The members with push permissions can rerun the failed workflows. And workflow failures due to downgrade of GitHub actions occur very rarely. Besides, the workflow_dispatch event could only triggered by member with push permission to the corresponding repo.

For the case where the workflow fails due to degradation of github action or other reasons, you could:

• ask for the reviewer to rerun the workflow
• force push or merge main branch (push a new commit) to retrigger the workflow

[bsmth]

The members with push permissions can rerun the failed workflows.

I assumed this was the case; just to confirm @yarusome - do you have these UI elements available to restart jobs?

[yarusome]

@bsmth They're indeed not available on my UI. I'm fine with the status quo since it's only the third time that I've encountered this issue.

[yin1999]

Unfortunately, GitHub Action's performance does degrade yesterday and today. I'm not sure if this is related to the release of action/checkout v4. Many people have reported related issues.

Hoping this issue to be resolved in the next few days.