Manually Initiating CI Runs

We just shipped the ability to manually initiate CI runs on RWX. Engineering teams can decide to make CI opt-in to push code freely without overly running CI and incurring higher costs.

#Use Case for Deciding When to Run

RWX runs CI/CD pipelines for large engineering organizations with massive test suites.

When an entire CI run takes 10+ cumulative hours of CPU time aggregated across all parallel tasks, engineers are usually more selective about when CI should run.

To push code freely without incurring higher CI costs, some engineering teams choose to have engineers opt-in to running CI.

#Opt-out of Running CI

There are a couple of ways that RWX supports opting out of running CI.

You can annotate commit messages with [skip ci] or [skip rwx].

$ git commit -m "Pushing for feedback [skip ci]"

You can also skip running for all Draft PRs:

on:
  github:
    pull_request:
      if: ${{ event.github.pull_request.pull_request.draft == false }}

Either of these approaches can work.

Skipping via annotating the commit message requires engineers to remember to do that though.

Similarly, skipping draft PRs requires remembering to open PRs in a draft status. Additionally, coupling CI runs to the draft status may be undesirable if teams want to use draft status for another purpose. Choosing whether CI should run and choosing whether a PR is ready for review should be independent decisions.

#Opt-in to Running CI

To make CI opt-in, add start: manually to the trigger.

on:
  github:
    pull_request:
      start: manually

#Demo