Deleting stale checks on github

Question

I have ended up with some stale checks, mostly as outcome of renaming/refactoring workflows, and I'd like to remove the stale ones, but github doesn't seem to expose any button/api.

How can I do that? Stale checks also prevent developers from merging their pr.

Answer 1

You may select your valid/updated check(s) from the list under Status checks found in the last week for this repository, to ensure that only the selected status checks are required to pass before merging.

The list of checks that show up there are the ones found for the last week, so the stale ones would go off from that settings page after over a week as those stale checks would no longer be found.

Answer 2

Note that could can end up with one more check to select/validate, as GitHub has updated its policy:

Updates to the Checks Data Retention Policy (14th Jan. 2022)

GitHub is updating the retention policy as it pertains to Checks data.
Checks created by GitHub Actions and third-party GitHub Apps will be affected by the new retention policy.

Starting on February 14th, 2022 GitHub will begin archiving detailed checks data older than 400 days.

As part of the archiving process, we will create a rollup commit status representing the state of all checks for that commit.
As a consequence, the merge box in any pull request with archived required checks will be in a blocked state and checks will need to be rerun in order to merge it.

Learn more about checks