wait-for-status-checks is a GitHub Action that polls the GitHub Check Runs on a Pull Request and waits until all runs succeed (or are skipped) or one of them fails. It provides a way to enforce "require triggered checks pass" vs. GitHub's naive "require checks to pass".

• Wait for GitHub Check Runs on a Pull Request
• Configure the poll interval and timeout
• Use as a "required check" to monitor other check runs

GitHub Actions Workflows can be triggered conditionally based on paths, branches, or commit message modifiers. This feature allows workflows (and their jobs) to run (or not) on a Pull Request based on what files changed, what branch was targeted, or whether a commit message skips checks (break glass).

name: workflow
on:
  pull_request:
    paths:
      - 'go/**'
    branches:
      - main

However, only GitHub jobs that always run can be made a "required check" in a branch protection rule or ruleset (see discussion). If a job is skipped because it's workflow wasn't triggered, making the job status "required" will block merges.

This arises frequently in large repos. For example, a workflow that runs a go fmt job only needs to run if *.go files were changed, but adding the paths filter means the status can't be marked as a "required check". Otherwise, PRs that don't modify Go files would be blocked from merging.

wait-for-status-checks polls the check runs for the head commit of a Pull Request until they all succeed or one fails. The action monitors check runs at some interval until a timeout is reached, which makes it a suitable way to enforce that all triggered checks succeeded.

• success - All check runs completed as either success or skipped
• failure - One or more check runs completed as with a non-successful conclusion (e.g. failure, stale, timed_out, cancelled)

name: summary
on:
  pull_request:
jobs:
  enforce-all-checks:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      checks: read
    steps:
      - name: GitHub Checks
        uses: poseidon/[email protected]
        with:
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

The action knows to exclude its own check run (i.e. the GitHub Actions job that runs wait-for-status-check)

Many alternatives have been tried:

• GitHub used to suggest that for each conditional workflow you wish to make required, create a dummy workflow job of the same name, that runs in the inverse case and passes to satisfy the required check. This is messy and was removed from their docs.
• Mixpanel built an internal GitHub App using GCP Pub/Sub
• Instead of using conditional GitHub Workflows, try to make each job conditional since skipped jobs are considered successes. This is obviously a workaround and 3rd party actions are needed to support paths filtering at the job level (e.g. dorny/paths-filter)