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Canceling a workflow

You can cancel a workflow run that is in progress. When you cancel a workflow run, GitHub cancels all jobs and steps that are a part of that workflow.

In this article

Note: GitHub-hosted runners are not currently supported on GitHub Enterprise Server. You can see more information about planned future support on the GitHub public roadmap.

Write access to the repository is required to perform these steps.

Canceling a workflow run

  1. On GitHub, navigate to the main page of the repository.

  2. Under your repository name, click Actions.

    Screenshot of the tabs for the "github/docs" repository. The "Actions" tab is highlighted with an orange outline.

  3. In the left sidebar, click the workflow you want to see.

    Screenshot of the left sidebar of the "Actions" tab. A workflow, "CodeQL," is outlined in dark orange.

  4. From the list of workflow runs, click the name of the queued or in progress run that you want to cancel.

  5. In the upper-right corner of the workflow, click Cancel workflow.

    Screenshot showing the summary for a workflow that is currently running. The "Cancel workflow" button is highlighted with a dark orange outline.

Steps GitHub takes to cancel a workflow run

When canceling workflow run, you may be running other software that uses resources that are related to the workflow run. To help you free up resources related to the workflow run, it may help to understand the steps GitHub performs to cancel a workflow run.

  1. To cancel the workflow run, the server re-evaluates if conditions for all currently running jobs. If the condition evaluates to true, the job will not get canceled. For example, the condition if: always() would evaluate to true and the job continues to run. When there is no condition, that is the equivalent of the condition if: success(), which only runs if the previous step finished successfully.
  2. For jobs that need to be canceled, the server sends a cancellation message to all the runner machines with jobs that need to be canceled.
  3. For jobs that continue to run, the server re-evaluates if conditions for the unfinished steps. If the condition evaluates to true, the step continues to run. You can use the cancelled expression to apply a status check of cancelled(). For more information see "Evaluate expressions in workflows and actions."
  4. For steps that need to be canceled, the runner machine sends SIGINT/Ctrl-C to the step's entry process (node for javascript action, docker for container action, and bash/cmd/pwd when using run in a step). If the process doesn't exit within 7500 ms, the runner will send SIGTERM/Ctrl-Break to the process, then wait for 2500 ms for the process to exit. If the process is still running, the runner kills the process tree.
  5. After the 5 minutes cancellation timeout period, the server will force terminate all jobs and steps that don't finish running or fail to complete the cancellation process.