GitHub Actions Concurrency

Question

I am creating a workflow in GitHub Actions and I'm having trouble with concurrency & lockable resources.

I have a job that runs unit tests on a specific resource. I have a pool of different resources that can be tested but only one of the resources can be tested at a time.

So I created a workflow call like this and set my concurrency group based on the name of my resource.

 on: 
  workflow_call:
    inputs:
      array:
        type: string
        required: true
                
concurrency:
  group: pytest-${{ inputs.array }}
  cancel-in-progress: false  


jobs:
  test:
    ...

The workflow that calls the workflow above is triggered when a push is made, so the same workflow can be run at once. I want to be able to test a resource that is currently not being tested. So I tried making a second job that would calls the workflow w/ a different resource name if it was cancelled. But I get an error saying I am not allowed to do so since I can't call on a workflow thats queue is full.

 on: 
  workflow_call:
    inputs:
      array:
        type: string
        required: true
                
concurrency:
  group: pytest-${{ inputs.array }}
  cancel-in-progress: false  


jobs:
  test:
    ...
 
  test_diff_array:
     needs: [test]
     if: {{ cancelled() }}
     uses: this/workflow/path@master
     with:
        array: diff_array_name

So idk what to do. Is there some lockable resource pool like Jenkins? Or sh

PS I dont want to use any public github actions

I tried looking up ways to make lockable resources like in Jenkins. Tried using github concurrency

Answer 1

${{ inputs.array }} expression will return null when used in concurrency block. Since it is returning null, your concurrency rule evaluates the group value as pytest- and tries to queue them. What you can try instead is to extract the input value by using this expression ${{ toJson(github.event.inputs.array) }} . So your concurrency block should look like this.

concurrency:
  group: pytest-${{ toJson(github.event.inputs.array) }}
  cancel-in-progress: false