Initial troubleshooting suggestions
There are several ways you can troubleshoot failed workflow runs.
Note
If you are on a GitHub Copilot Free subscription, this will count towards your monthly chat message limit.
Using GitHub Copilot
To open a chat with GitHub Copilot about a failed workflow run, you can either:
- Next to the failed check in the merge box, click , then click Explain error.
- In the merge box, click on the failed check. At the top of the workflow run summary page, click Explain error.
This opens a chat window with GitHub Copilot, where it will provide instructions to resolve the issue.
Using workflow run logs
Each workflow run generates activity logs that you can view, search, and download. For more information, see Using workflow run logs.
Enabling debug logging
If the workflow logs do not provide enough detail to diagnose why a workflow, job, or step is not working as expected, you can enable additional debug logging. For more information, see Enabling debug logging.
If your workflow uses specific tools or actions, enabling their debug or verbose logging options can help generate more detailed output for troubleshooting.
For example, you can use npm install --verbose for npm or GIT_TRACE=1 GIT_CURL_VERBOSE=1 git ... for git.
Reviewing billing errors
Actions usage includes runner minutes and storage for workflow artifacts. For more information, see GitHub Actions billing.
Setting a budget
Setting an Actions budget may help immediately unblock workflows failing due to billing or storage errors. It will allow further minutes and storage usage to be billed up to the set budget amount. To learn more, see Setting up budgets to control spending on metered products.
Reviewing GitHub Actions activity with metrics
To analyze the efficiency and reliability of your workflows using metrics, see Viewing GitHub Actions metrics.
Troubleshooting workflow triggers
You can review your workflow’s on: field to understand what is expected to trigger the workflow. For more information, see Triggering a workflow.
For a full list of available events, see Events that trigger workflows.
Triggering event conditions
Some triggering events only run from the default branch (i.e. issues, schedule). Workflow file versions that exist outside of the default branch will not trigger on these events.
Workflows will not run on pull_request activity if the pull request has a merge conflict.
Workflows that would otherwise be triggered on push or pull_request activity will be skipped if the commit message contains a skip annotation. For more information, see Skipping workflow runs.
Scheduled workflows running at unexpected times
Scheduled events can be delayed during periods of high loads of GitHub Actions workflow runs.
High load times include the start of every hour. If the load is sufficiently high enough, some queued jobs may be dropped. To decrease the chance of delay, schedule your workflow to run at a different time of the hour. For more information, see Events that trigger workflows.
Filtering and diff limits
Specific events allow for filtering by branch, tag, and/or paths you can customize. Workflow run creation will be skipped if the filter conditions apply to filter out the workflow.
You can use special characters with filters. For more information, see Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions.
For path filtering, evaluating diffs is limited to the first 300 files. If there are files changed that are not matched in the first 300 files returned by the filter, the workflow will not be run. For more information, see Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions.
Troubleshoot workflow execution
Workflow execution involves any issues seen after the workflow was triggered and a workflow run has been created.
Canceling Workflows
If standard cancellation through the UI or API does not process as expected, there may be a conditional statement configured for your running workflow job(s) that causes it to not cancel.
In these cases, you can leverage the API to force cancel the run. For more information, see REST API endpoints for workflow runs.
A common cause can be using the always() status check function which returns true, even on cancellation. An alternative is to use the inverse of the cancelled() function, ${{ !cancelled() }}.
For more information, see Using conditions to control job execution and Canceling a workflow run.
Troubleshooting runners
Defining runner labels
GitHub-hosted runners leverage preset labels maintained through the actions/runner-images repository.
We recommend using unique label names for larger and self-hosted runners. If a label matches to any of the existing preset labels, there can be runner assignment issues where there is no guarantee on which matching runner option the job will run on.
Self-hosted runners
If you use self-hosted runners, you can view their activity and diagnose common issues.
For more information, see Monitoring and troubleshooting self-hosted runners.