Ability to restart individual failed GitHub Actions jobs while workflow is still running

[janpio]

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https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/4278 and actions/runner#432 added the ability to re-start individual jobs, instead of having to re-run all the jobs in a workflow when one fails. That already was a great improvement and avoided a lot of wasteful CI minutes.

But now we still have to wait for all jobs in a workflow to finish before we can do that. If a quick job fails because of some temporary or flaky error, we have to wait for the one super slow job to finish - and only then can we click the button to restart the job that failed. That leads to us sitting in front of GH Actions tabs, waiting for the workflow to fail fully. If we could restart individual jobs earlier, that would be much more efficient.

Please let us instantly restart failed jobs while the rest of the workflow is still in progress.

(Written while waiting for a slow job to finish so I can restart a fast one that failed 10 minutes ago because of some network problem)

[lobsterkatie]

@janpio Thanks for splitting this off into its own discussion!

I said this in the original discussion, but while being able to re-run the job as soon as it fails would be the best solution, I'd settle for a "Cancel workflow & rerun failed jobs" button.

As it stands, I have to do the cancel and rerun steps individually, which would be annoying but ultimately fine if cancellation were instantaneous. It isn't, though, so instead I have to wait around for the cancellation to take before I can then rerun the jobs (which is in and of itself a harder process than it needs to be, as @melissachang does an excellent job of describing here).

[janpio]

That might be an alternative approach, indeed.

In our case that would not be a great solution though, as cancelling the long-running jobs (which would succeed when just left alone) would again make the total runtime of the tests longer because they have to start over.

A third option could be a Rerun all failed jobs (while other jobs are still running). That might indeed be a good option as well, additionally to the "restart individual failed jobs" I suggested originally.

[lobsterkatie]

Yes, you make a good point about the timing. No question that being able to rerun some or all failing jobs while others are still running is the best solution.

[Felixoid]

Our CI runs 6 hours on average. Each test task runs for 1h. Around 100+ of total jobs.

Imaging canceling running tests (and losing all the CPU time spent) because of one network error or a dead spot EC2 instance.

As much as it's a workaround, for our case, it's not even close to a solution, but to a total disaster. As @janpio stated

[idoudali]

In our team we are in a similar position.
In our CI we have a number of long-running jobs ( > 1hours ) , canceling and restarting all of them would lead to significant lost compute

[emmahsax]

We should have the ability to:

• rerun any job before the whole workflow is complete
• rerun any jobs via select checkboxes, versus being able to run only all or all failed
• rerun any successful job... yes sometimes it can be helpful to rerun successful jobs

[Elio-FairlyMade]

Up on this subject
Waiting slow jobs to complete before relaunching the job that fails is really painful.

[thimios]

+1

[nebuk89]

Thanks for this feedback! We are thinking on this and also about what primitives we need (how exit codes/status need to evolve) in this area. It's not something we are doing right now, but I really appreciate the engagement and please keep voting this up if you are interested <3

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