Please support something like "allow-failure" for a given job

Edit from @vanZeben:

As this is a GitHub Actions platform feature request, discussion for this feature has been moved to https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/15452, please go and put your support behind that community discussion instead of this issue.

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We use github actions in our “snapd” project and we love them.

One small feature we would love to see is a way to mark a test job as “allow-failure” (or a term along these lines) [0]. This would simply mean that the overall /pulls overview page would show the PR as with the little green tick-mark (and maybe in the tooltip 5/6 OK, 1 ignored). It would still show as a failure in the details view (maybe with a different icon?).

Our use-case is that we have some CI environments that fail frequently because of external factors like repository mirrors that are our of sync etc. We still want to run the CI on these systems but not get distracted too much by these out-of-our-control issues.

Hope this makes sense.

Thanks! Michael

[0] E.g.

jobs:
  spread:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    allow-failure: true
    steps:
    - do-some-flaky-stuff

[fingolfin]

I don’t think it is that specific. People have requested this before: https://github.community/t5/GitHub-Actions/continue-on-error-allow-failure-UI-indication/td-p/37033

I just came here via Google as I was surprised I couldn’t find anything like this in the documentation. It’s standard with e.g. Travis CI

[mvo5]

Hey @thboop. Thanks for your quick reply!

Yeah, it’s really just about the little green tick at the pull-request overview page. AFAICT when one job (even if it’s not required) fails the overview PR list will show this PR as failed. Having a way to mark certain jobs as not rquired would still show the pulls as green (or yellow?) instead of red.

But I do understand this is a bit of a specific request, so feel free to close it if you think it’s a bit too odd. We had it with our old CI system and I liked it.