GitHub Actions now supports skipping push and pull_request workflows by looking for some common keywords in your commit message.
If any commit message in your push or the HEAD commit of your PR contains the strings [skip ci], [ci skip], [no ci], [skip actions], or [actions skip] workflows triggered on the push or pull_request events will be skipped.
There are certain situations where I don't want CI run. Mostly this happens when I plan to push a cascading wave of commits to a branch. Rather than watch my build minutes tick up, I would prefer to skip the CI entirely.
Here's an example of me with a Vercel deployment, which is running, but my integration test with Cypress is not. This is because those tests are required.
So keep that in mind if you do enable this.
I also want to point out that this feature came through to gitHub.community forums. If there are aspects of GitHub Actions that are missing in its feature set, definitely head over to the community forums and drop us a note.
This is part of my 28 days of Actions series. To get notified of more GitHub Action tips, follow the GitHub organization right here on Dev.