Skip or cancel jobs and workflows

This document describes how to skip or cancel work when triggering pipelines. There are a couple of ways to do this. The jobs within a pipeline can be skipped on commit, or workflows can be cancelled using the auto-cancel feature. Both methods are described below.

By default, CircleCI automatically triggers a pipeline whenever you push changes to your project. You can override this behavior by adding a [ci skip] or [skip ci] tag within the first 250 characters of the body or title of the commit. This not only skips the marked commit, but also all other commits in the push.

A few points to note regarding the scope of the ci skip feature:

• The pipeline and workflows will still exist for these commits but no jobs will be run.
• If you push multiple commits at once, a single [ci skip] or [skip ci] will skip the build for all commits.
• This feature is not supported for fork PRs. Scheduled workflows will run even if you push a commit with [ci skip] message. Changing the config file is the way to upgrade the current schedule.

$ git log origin/master..HEAD

commit 63ce74221ff899955dd6258020d6cb9accede893
Author: Daniel Woelfel
Date:   Wed Jan 23 16:48:25 2017 -0800

    fix misspelling [ci skip]

When pushed to a VCS, this commit will not be built on CircleCI because of the [ci skip] in the commit title.

$ git log origin/master..HEAD

commit 99b4ce4d59e79cb379987b39c65f7113631f0635
Merge: 16ba8ca adc6571
Author: Daniel Woelfel
Date:   Tue Apr 25 15:56:42 2016 -0800

    A large feature with squashed commits

    [skip ci] Fix bug in feature
    Refactor feature code
    First attempt at feature

When pushed to a VCS, this commit will not be built on CircleCI because of the [ci skip] or [skip ci] in the commit description.

If you are frequently pushing changes to a branch, you increase the chances of queueing. This means you might have to wait for an older pipeline to complete before the most recent version starts.

To save time, you can configure CircleCI to automatically cancel any non-terminated workflows when a newer pipeline is triggered on that same branch.

A few points to note regarding the use of the auto-cancel feature:

• Your project’s default branch (usually main) will never auto-cancel workflows.
• Auto-cancel affect pipelines triggered by pushes to a VCS or via the API.
• Only workflows that are triggered when the feature is enabled will be auto-cancelled.

1. In the CircleCI application, go to your Project Settings.

2. Click on Advanced Settings.

3. Toggle the switch to enable the Auto-cancel redundant workflows option.

Projects which have auto-cancel enabled will have pipelines and workflows on non-default branches cancelled when a newer build is triggered on that same branch, with the following exceptions:

• Scheduled workflows
• Re-run workflows