GitHub Actions running old Workflow file?

[edemaine]

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Are there scenarios where GitHub Actions runs an older version of a workflow, instead of the current version in a PR?

Here's an example where this seems to be happening:

• Workflow run
• Workflow file has a step "Install dependencies" that doesn't seem to be getting run
• PR

I've tried rerunning the jobs, and modifying the workflow file a few more times, and it seems to be making no difference. Is there a cache somewhere I should clear? I've tried deleting everything in https://github.com/KaTeX/KaTeX/actions/caches

[GC-Configit]

We have a similar issue. In the pull request, we have updated the workflow file, but the runner is using the old file. Furthermore, if you open a workflow run ➡ summary ➡ Workflow file, you can see a changed file with new code but in the workflow run you can't spot these changes it still runs the old file.

However, the changes were applied when I ran the same workflow using dispatch action. It seems that PR GitHub uses old workflow files, but I have no idea why.

[edemaine]

Yes, the behavior sounds identical — thank you for sharing. If I understand dispatch actions, it seems like I need to enable workflow_dispatch on the default branch, and this can't be done purely within the PR. 🙁

[GC-Configit]

@edemaine ok, I found my issue. In that specific workflow file, I was using pull_request_target trigger instead of pull_request. This caused this behaviour I copy pasted it from the internet and didn't spot a difference to my other workflows. here is an article which describes differences. Well, it wasn't a bug but expected behaviour my bad was that I didn't spot the difference in the trigger name.

[edemaine]

Oh, that's exactly what's going on here! Thank you!

[edemaine]

Just a followup to confirm that workflow_dispatch works around this issue — you can request running within the branch instead of pull_request_target's behavior — so it's a nice way to test pull_request_target triggers from within pull requests. (But you need to modify the main and PR branches to include workflow_dispatch triggers.)