New commit randomly does not trigger a new workflow run

[canvural]

Hi,

My issue is two fold.

I'm checking out the repo with a personal token, so that I can push back the commit and trigger new workflow runs. Like so

- name: Checkout
  uses: actions/checkout@v4
  with:
    token: ${{ steps.generate_token.outputs.token }}

This works correctly, and when this action pushes new commit a new workflow runs and because of the concurrency settings Github Actions cancels the current workflow. All good.

But the above snippet results in a detached head state. This later causes some issues. So I modified the script like so:

- name: Checkout
  uses: actions/checkout@v4
  with:
    token: ${{ steps.generate_token.outputs.token }}
    ref: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.ref }}

so that it'll checkout the branch correctly. No more detached head states.

But this brings out another issue. When I check out the repo like this, a new commit with this action does not trigger a new workflow run 🤯 But also it seems random, because in some cases it did trigger a new run 🤷🏽

Did anybody have this kind of issue before? I'm not sure where the problem is though. This action or actions/checkout I also tried:

• checking out the repo with ref: ${{ github.ref }}
• checking out the repo with ref: ${{ github.head_ref }}

still same issue.

[stefanzweifel]

When the Action fails to trigger another workflow, are the commits going to the right branch?
Maybe adding an explicit branch-setting can help here.

- uses: stefanzweifel/git-auto-commit-action@v5
  with:
    branch: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.ref }}

Or are you working with forks? Do those rogue commits go the fork-repo?

[stefanzweifel]

This is truly bizzare. 🤯

I don't have any workflows that use a personal access token so the commit will trigger another workflow again … so can't give guidance based on experience.

As this whole logic of "should a commit trigger a workflow run" is part of GitHub Actions and not really of git-auto-commit, maybe it's worth raising this issue in the actions/runner repo?
The number of open issues however is suffocating. 🙃

I assume this has something to do with the inner workings of GitHub. All this action does is push a commit to a remote repository.

[canvural]

Yeah it is very weird. And likely not related to this action. But I have another question:

The reason detached state causes issue is that if I use this action on a branch that is behind master, it gives the following error:

Is this expected? It works perfectly fine if the branch of the PR is in sync with master

[canvural]

OK I tested more stuff. And looks like if the PR branch is not behind the master it works every time. But if the PR branch is behind, the new commit does not trigger a new workflow.

Does that make any sense to you? 😅

[stefanzweifel]

The error message you're seeing is coming from the fact that the action currently internally runs git-checkout and switches branches: https://github.com/stefanzweifel/git-auto-commit-action/blob/master/entrypoint.sh#L104-L111

You can disable this feature by adding a skip_checkout: true option to your workflow.
Maybe that fixes your issue?

(In the next major version of the Action, I would like to remove this piece of logic. A PR for this has been created #314)

To make 100% sure that your checked out repo is never behind the remote repository, you would have to run git-pull yourself. git-auto-commit will not do that for you.

[canvural]

Yeah I already tried skip_fetch and skip_checkout, same issue :/

But it's just weird it only happens if the PR branch is behind.