Skip to content

A simple locking/unlocking mechanism to provide mutual exclusion in Github Actions

License

Notifications You must be signed in to change notification settings

ben-z/gh-action-mutex

Use this GitHub action with your project
Add this Action to an existing workflow or create a new one
View on Marketplace

Folders and files

NameName
Last commit message
Last commit date

Latest commit

 

History

56 Commits
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Repository files navigation

gh-action-mutex

A simple locking/unlocking mechanism to provide mutual exclusion in Github Actions

Getting started

To prevent concurrent access to a job:

jobs:
  run_in_mutex:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: Simple mutex test
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Set up mutex
        uses: ben-z/gh-action-mutex@v1.0.0-alpha.9
      - run: |
          echo "I am protected!"
          sleep 5

By default, the gh-mutex branch in the current repo is used to store the state of locks.

To have multiple mutexes, simply specify the branch argument in the workflow config:

jobs:
  two_clients_test_client_1:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: Two clients test (client 1)
    needs: [simple_test]
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Set up mutex
        uses: ben-z/gh-action-mutex@v1.0.0-alpha.9
        with:
          branch: another-mutex
      - run: |
          echo "I am protected by the 'another-mutex' mutex!"
          sleep 5

More options such as using a different repo to store the mutex (which allows sharing a mutex between jobs from arbitrary repos) or using different access tokens can be found in action.yml.

GitHub Enterprise Server

It might be necessary to adjust the GitHub Server URL in case you are using a GitHub Enterprise Server. You can adjust the server URL by providing github_server input to the action. Please make sure to not include the https://.

Motivation

GitHub Action has the concurrency option for preventing running multiple jobs concurrently. However, it has a queue of length 1. When multiple jobs with the same concurrency group get queued, only the currently running job and the latest queued job are kept. Other jobs are simply cancelled. There's more discussion here and it appears that GitHub does not want to add the requested cancel-pending feature any time soon (as of 2022-03-26). This GitHub action solves that issue.

Implementation Details

Mutexes are implemented using simple spinlocks. The test-and-set functionality is provided by Git, where a git push can only succeed if the commit to be pushed is a fast-forward of what's on the remote.

Developing Locally

  1. Install act
  2. Populate .github-token with a personal access token with the repo permision.
  3. act --rebuild -v -s GITHUB_TOKEN=$(cat .github-token)

Inspirations

About

A simple locking/unlocking mechanism to provide mutual exclusion in Github Actions

Resources

License

Stars

Watchers

Forks

Sponsor this project

 

Packages

No packages published