How to always disable/skip a job in Github actions? (Not step/action)

Question

I have the following workflow:

name: CICD

# ...

jobs:
  CI:
    uses: ...
  CD:
    needs: [CI]
    uses: ...

I have encountered an issue that needs me to temporally disable the CD job that uses other workflows (not just a single step or action).

What I have tried:

There seems to be a recent update about "Skipping workflow runs"

You can skip workflow runs triggered by the push and pull_request events by including a command in your commit message.

This sounds inconvenient, at the bottom they mention:

You can also disable a workflow from running. For more information, see "Disabling and enabling a workflow."

In which you can disable and re-enable a workflow using the GitHub UI, the REST API, or GitHub CLI. However, this doesn't seem to work for when the workflow is being used as a reusable workflows.

I can also simply omit the logic:

name: CICD

# ...

jobs:
  CI:
    uses: ...

But I want to preserve the version control history differently (+ make my pipeline explicitly state the job was disabled / skipped)

Is there a workaround?

Virgilio

Answer 1

Yes, you can use conditions to control job execution:

You can instead use the jobs.<job_id>.if conditional to prevent a job from running unless a condition is met.

So if you update your CD job workflow to an indefinite negative condition:

name: CICD

# ...

jobs:
  CI:
    uses: ...
  CD:
    if: false
    needs: [CI]
    uses: ...

It will cause the job to always be skipped (i.e. "disabled").

Virgilio