Allow to skip/cancel builds successfully

[mateuszkocz]

Which problem is this feature request solving?

Hello. I've been experimenting with a plugin that would allow builds to be cancelled prematurely, based on some "smart" logic. Something akin to build.ignore but with a plugin instead.

Currently, in order to cancel a build one needs to use utils.build.cancelBuild. According to the docs, it "indicate[s] that the build is being cancelled as planned". Unfortunately, the Netlify's integration on GitHub doesn't consider this action to be "as planned" and reports a failure, making it impossible to proceed with PRs not meant to be built.

PR with this behaviour.

Describe the solution you'd like

It would be great if the cancelBuild reported an "ok" to GitHub allowing the skipped PRs to be merged, or if there was another function available to implement this kind of behaviour (like utils.build.skipBuild).

Describe alternatives you've considered

I tried to use build.ignore in netlify.toml and see what happens, but was unsuccessful in triggering the ignoring behaviour, so I can't properly examine how that scenario would work. 🙈

Can you submit a pull request?

~Yes~/No. (I don't know much about what's going on in here. 😔)

[ehmicky]

Thanks for reporting this @mateuszkocz

@kitop @keiko713 cancelBuild() calls the cancelSiteDeploy endpoint. Shouldn't that endpoint result in successful GitHub PR statuses?

[keiko713]

Thanks for the report, @mateuszkocz !

Canceling build/deploy is treated as "failed deploy", therefore it'll result failed in GH PR status.

I'd say that we want to treat this as failed deploy, since lots of sites are using this deploy process as CI/CD and I would feel wrong to say "success" there without successfully finishing it (aka aborted in the middle).

However, maybe we could report it as neutral state (not success nor failed), which what we are actually doing when the build.ignore setting is triggered. Not sure if we want to do it as "default", or we want to do it "only under certain condition" though. Thoughts @kitop ?

[kitop]

However, maybe we could report it as neutral state (not success nor failed), which what we are actually doing when the build.ignore setting is triggered. Not sure if we want to do it as "default", or we want to do it "only under certain condition" though. Thoughts @kitop ?

Mhm... this is a good question. We already have some related internal issues around it (https://github.com/netlify/bitballoon/issues/4112, https://github.com/netlify/bitballoon/issues/4572, https://github.com/netlify/bitballoon/issues/5307).

The cancel event is always user-triggered, either via UI or build plugins. I'd be OK with it always being neutral. It'll be consistent with build.ignore which is also user-triggered. Updating the comment to say "canceled" rather than "failed" will be a big improvement in terms of clarity as well.

[ehmicky]

This makes more sense to me as well.

[keiko713]

Cool, let's go with the neutral state then. Would be indeed nice to fix this with other related issues but we could also scope this down. I'll create an internal issue to track this 👍

[ehmicky]

This was reported in Netlify community as well: https://community.netlify.com/t/canceling-build-and-pull-request-in-github/16123/2

[andefred]

Do we have any status on this yet? Or a possible workaround when you are deploying multiple apps from an NX repo, based on the blogpost on your blog... Would be great if that did not report builds as failed to github. I think that either introduce a new flag to the cancelBuild command so that we could do something like utils.build.cancelBuild({ message: 'Intentionally canceled by plugin', gracefulExit: true}) and based on the new flag the github hook could then report as neutral instead. The default value could be false, so that if people are already using this function to intentionally fail builds, it won't break for them.

[ehmicky]

Hi @andefred, Thanks for chiming in. This feature is in our backlog, and we are working on prioritizing it so we can ship it as soon as possible. Thanks for the additional feedback!

[cwcoffman]

I am having the same issue, and have to manually trigger EVERY build. Pretty please, fix this!

Just to confirm, this is my typical build logs, even after significant changes:

10:44:29 AM: Build ready to start 10:44:30 AM: build-image version: b0258b965567defc4a2d7e2f2dec2e00c8f73ad6 10:44:30 AM: build-image tag: v3.4.1 10:44:30 AM: buildbot version: 0a44c930054be748eff0c581d346282fece89cc0 10:44:31 AM: Fetching cached dependencies 10:44:31 AM: Starting to download cache of 135.4MB 10:44:33 AM: Finished downloading cache in 2.201351282s 10:44:33 AM: Starting to extract cache 10:44:36 AM: Finished extracting cache in 3.598670794s 10:44:36 AM: Finished fetching cache in 5.903589307s 10:44:36 AM: Starting to prepare the repo for build 10:44:37 AM: Preparing Git Reference refs/heads/master 10:44:39 AM: Different publish path detected, going to use the one specified in the Netlify configuration file: 'System Architecture/Blast API/public' versus 'public/' in the Netlify UI 10:44:39 AM: No changes detected in base directory. Returning early from build. 10:44:39 AM: Failed during stage 'checking build content for changes': Canceled build due to no content change 10:44:39 AM: Finished processing build request in 8.787778378s

[rembrandtreyes]

Hi @ehmicky, Are there any updates on this issue?

[ehmicky]

Hi @rembrandtreyes, Unfortunately, the status has not changed since https://github.com/netlify/build/issues/1224#issuecomment-713821335

[warmbowski]

Just popping in here to request that this issue get prioritized a bit, since it's been agreed that changing the canceled build status to successful (or neutral) would be a proper thing to do. Seeing successful builds marked a failed in GH is a bummer. ;)

[airtonix]

This happens when using the webhook slack notifications too... our deployment channel gets spammed with failures when all that's happening is the git commit resulted in a ignored build.

[jg-stack]

Hi @ehmicky ,

Is there any further updates on this issue?

Thanks in advance 🙏

[ehmicky]

Unfortunately not, but thanks for checking @jg-stack.

[filipwiniarski]

For the time being, has anyone figured out some workaround? 🙏

[smasala]

skipBuild command would be great!

[marekhoryna]

Hey @ehmicky, are there any more updates on this issue? We would really use an ability to skipBuild or treating cancel build as neutral as well.

We could also help with opening a PR if you can provide us some initial guidance.

[y04nqt]

+1 would appreciate the ability not to have red marks when we skip or cancel a build.

[kitop]

I believe this has been solved and announced in https://answers.netlify.com/t/canceled-deploys-considered-neutral-in-github-checks/78832 Can you confirm?

[marekhoryna]

I believe this has been solved and announced in https://answers.netlify.com/t/canceled-deploys-considered-neutral-in-github-checks/78832 Can you confirm?

Can confirm this solved the issue for us. Thanks!

[andefred]

I think that this should resolve the issue since it returns neutral. I don't have access to the repo where this was an issue so I can't actually check. But based on the above answer it looks like it should resolve it. Happy to close this issue with that solution.