How to cancel concurrent workflows except on main and tags

[cgraham-rs]

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I'm struggling with the necessary concurrency logic to accomplish what my team wants.

• We only trigger on push
• We want to cancel all concurrent runs EXCEPT those running against main and tags
• The existing logic below IS in fact canceling runs against main
• My current guess is that in some scenarios github.ref simply doesn't contain the value we think it does, though the group name includes refs/heads/main in the screenshot of the canceled workflow below (I'm assuming that's the group listed in the annotations)

name: ci
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - '**'
    tags:
      - v*

concurrency:
  group: ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.ref }}
  cancel-in-progress: ${{ !(github.ref == 'refs/heads/main' || startsWith(github.ref, 'refs/tags/')) }}

[cgraham-rs]

We ended up adding a pull_request trigger and simply applying concurrency for pull_request only. Much simpler logic. Less risk of bad logic impacting non-PR workflows.

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - 'main'
    tags:
      - v*
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - '**'

concurrency:
  # Only cancel in-progress runs for pull_request events, this prevents canceling workflows against main or tags
  # A pull_request will reuse the same group thus enabling cancelation, all others receive a unique run_id
  group: ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.event.pull_request.number || github.run_id }}
  cancel-in-progress: true