GH Actions - Timeout Approval for Workflow?

[ndom91]

Hi everybody!

I noticed our GH Actions which weren't approved seem to hang around for the default 30 day timeout. I'd like to kill these much earlier (~12hrs), but they're not idling in a workflow or job, they're waiting on approval from the environment protection rules.

I haven't found a way to set a timeout-minutes option for that specifically. Is it not possible?

If not, can you recommend anything else?

[thuongtruong1009]

Hi @ndom91
You can learn control time to cron at Crontab Guru

[ndom91]

I'm familiar with setting a cron-style trigger for GH Actions, but this is not what I want to achieve. The goal is to timeout "Waiting on Approval" jobs which have already been submitted, but not approved due to there being newer PRs, etc.

[ndom91]

Or are you suggesting running a separate GH Action on a schedule, like every 6 hrs and in it using the GH CLI or rest client to cancel those running GH Actions waiting on approval? Not such a bad idea actually haha, but more effort than its worth tbh 😂

[marcin-sg]

Same problem here and also there #5673.

[oliversalzburg]

Setting a concurrency group with cancel-in-progress helps in some scenarios.

[benjiwolff]

We are also missing an option to set a default timeout period.

[Silva4g]

I have an similar case, I'm adding a concurrency and an reviewer, every time it's add a new pipeline it's stopped because one wasn't approve or deny, so I would like to add an time-out in the approval to resolve it

[bparthas21]

In the Setting -> Environments section, I see an option to set a timeout for approval.

[xuxu314]

no, its not the same thing. timer is set for deployments to wait a certain period of time, then trigger deployment workflow

[bparthas21]

My understanding of OPs question is

• Workflow triggers and waits for approval.
• OP wants the workflow to proceed without approval after X amount of time (aka timeout).

If that's correct, isn't the checkbox "Wait timer" meant for that purpose? (that's what the description seems to indicate).

[degould-mm]

The OP wants to kill the deployment, which is awaiting approval, before the 30 day timeout. The wait timer is to delay the deployment for x minutes. Two different things.

[humzam]

We are unhappy with the current solution as well. The default timeout of 30 days is incredibly long. Would really like the ability to configure deployment approval timeouts.

[oliora]

+1

[defyjoy]

Honestly , the jobs should be cancelled and not failed . Having failed job shows all the actions tab as failed ( red icon ) and it is not very intuitive to know if ACTUALLY the job failed due to error pipeline error or it's just cancelled.

Having a timeout to cancel the job instead so that the pipeline shows as cancelled ( grey icon ) and not error ( Red icon )