Is there a way to delete or hide old/renamed Workflows?

[ryanvanderpol]

I made a Workflow using the Node CI template and then later renamed it.  Now my Workflow list has “Node CI” in it, but that doesnt even exist anymore.  Is there some way for me to hide it?  Or is it there forever?

Screen Shot 2019-09-18 at 11.38.27 AM.png718×664 27.9 KB

[ethomson]

You can’t remove it yet, but it won’t be there forever.  You can’t delete it yet but we’ll have functionality to delete this in the future.

[SMASTER4]

The funny thing is that after deleting the workflow file it is still running and you can't even disable it aynmore. Is this a bug or intended? Would be nice if the workflow just disappears if you delete the coresponding file. So intuetive and easy. I am a dev and I know that this can be hard depending on your system, but why do I even have this file in my repo when the file acctually used is stored somewhere else seamingly?

[pcornelissen]

it's not that easy, because you might need the run logs for misuse tracking. Consider a large dev team with one bad actor that creates a branch with a build file, executes the build and removes the branch. There would be no trace.
But hiding old workflows would be an option

[SMASTER4]

@pcornelissen what is the issue with that when the branch is gone? The bad actor would have made zero changes to the project as far as I understand. Or did I get you wrong?

[pcornelissen]

When you deploy from source then you can execute any code bypass all checks and deploy the code

[SMASTER4]

Ah yeah. I just thought about building and testing. I forgot that you can also deploy stuff with Github Actions. Thank you for calarification @pcornelissen.

[sanewalt22]

Its been 3 months since this post?  Can I delete yet?   Its annoying that a typo leaves an action in the workflow

[andykimchris]

Still waiting on this 😢

[Long18]

Still waiting here 😭

[AFMiziara]

👀 "near feature". It's been 5 years

[avandenbogaert]

@ethomson C'mon, how much in the future do we need to go before we can delete workflows

[flipbit03]

Sorry, but this is frustrating, as I too have been waiting on this for quite a while. It's literally a "delete all from given workflow". That seems very straightforward to implement and I don't understand how something like this can stay blocked/forgotten for 4+ years 🥴

[FabioLuporini]

Hi,

any updates on this issue/feature?

we have several spurious workflows here: https://github.com/devitocodes/devito/actions

and we’re really looking forward for some clean up …

Thanks!

[vfdev-5]

Any updates on that ?

[ggorman]

I got all excited when I saw this was marked as “solved/go to solution”. Then I found the solution was to wait as it would be fixed sometime in the future! We could close all our issues right now with the same message 😉

Seriously though, while we love actions and are creating/recreating lots of them, our actions page littered with orphaned action detritus. 

[Yarden-zamir]

You are completley correct. So correct infact that your answer should be marked as the solution

[JakaKokosar]

@ethomson wrote:

You can’t remove it yet, but it won’t be there forever.  You can’t delete it yet but we’ll have functionality to delete this in the future.

How is this solved? Any update on this? And what do you mean by won’t be there forever? They do.

[dan-rally]

Hi, with all due respect this doesn’t exactly “solve” the problem, is there any update or ETA on this please? Thanks

[shinebayar-g]

We really need this feature… Wanna get rid of those old experimental workflows.

[FabioLuporini]

Hi, any ETA on this?

Thanks!

[molszanski]

Has anyone figured a way to clean them?

[blakethepatton]

Also looking forward to seeing this. 

[chuckatkins]

@jakakokosar wrote:

How is this solved?

“solved” = “won’t fix” it seems.

[marksoccar]

Hey Guys, i see that many have asked this me also was going to ask, but i found a work around.
you can simply go to your repo home_folder/.github/workflows, Then delete the workflow that you wish to remove and commit 😉

[karthick-core]

This is not working. I deleted the workflow but still actions has all history of workflow executions. Currently there is no way to get rid of this.

[marksoccar]

I tried this myself, make sure you push to github repo after you delete files related to workflow.

[burnettk]

Combining @dmitrym0 comment with the limit 500 in @maximbaz comment (because the default limit is smaller). Make sure you cd into the repo in question, and make sure you swap out stale-workflow.yml with the name of your actual deprecated workflow file. gh is the github cli.

gh run list --limit 500 --workflow=stale-workflow.yml --json databaseId | jq '.[].databaseId' | xargs -I{} gh run delete {}

[theofficialgman]

I have a unique issue that is related. Our repo has no workflow runs of a now renamed (added .disabled to the end of the filename) workflow. Yet it still shows up in the list.

https://github.com/Botspot/pi-apps/actions/workflows/update_apps_raspbian_addons.yml

running gh run list --limit 500 --workflow=update_apps_raspbian_addons.yml --json databaseId produces empty output as expected.

So for me there is no workaround available for getting this workflow to not show up.

[juliandreas]

The fact that this is a 5 year old issue is WILD 💀

[dmitrym0]

I have a unique issue that is related. Our repo has no workflow runs of a now renamed (added .disabled to the end of the filename) workflow. Yet it still shows up in the list.

https://github.com/Botspot/pi-apps/actions/workflows/update_apps_raspbian_addons.yml

running gh run list --limit 500 --workflow=update_apps_raspbian_addons.yml --json databaseId produces empty output as expected.

So for me there is no workaround available for getting this workflow to not show up.

If you really hate seeing hang around, try bringing it back and add a dummy run (something like echo 'test' or something). Then delete that run and see if the workflow goes away?

[theofficialgman]

I was able to remove it by first, re-enabling (removing .disabled from the name), running the workflow, and then removing the workflow_dispatch trigger from the workflow. Afterwords I could then disable it again (add .disabled) and it stays gone.

[kondei]

I really want to delete old actions.

[stan-stately]

would love to see this

[MadDeveloper]

https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/26256#discussioncomment-7295831

[Long18]

I think you can do as follows.

First, you create a new script, here I name it delete.yml (.github/workflows/delete.yml)

name: Remove Expired Workflow Runs
on:
  schedule: [{ cron: "30 1 * * *" }] # Schedule to run the workflow every day at 1:30 AM
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  clean:
    name: Delete Expired Workflow Runs
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout Action Code
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Run Delete Script
        # run: sh ./delete.sh (your org or github name) (your repo name)
        run: sh ./delete.sh Long18 github-test-action
        working-directory: .github/actions
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Next, I have a new script, I name it delete.sh (.github/actions/delete.sh)

#!/bin/bash

org="$1"
repo="$2"

echo "Deleting workflow runs for $org/$repo"

workflows_temp=$(mktemp) # Creates a temporary file to store workflow data.

gh api repos/$org/$repo/actions/workflows | jq -r '.workflows[] | [.id, .path] | @tsv' > $workflows_temp # Lookup workflow
cat "$workflows_temp" 

workflows_names=$(awk '{print $2}' $workflows_temp | grep -v "main")

if [ -z "$workflows_names" ]; then

    echo "All workflows are either successful or failed. Nothing to remove"

else

    echo "Removing all the workflows that are not successful or failed"

    for workflow_name in $workflows_names; do

        workflow_filename=$(basename "$workflow_name")
        echo "Deleting |$workflow_filename|, please wait..."

        gh run list --limit 500 --workflow $workflow_filename --json databaseId |
            jq -r '.[] | .databaseId' |
            xargs -I{} gh run delete {} # Delete all workflow runs for workflow name
    done
fi

rm -rf $workflows_temp

echo "Done."

That's it, you're done. Good luck!

[piotrekkr]

They've added a script in docs for this instead of giving people UI / API to do just this.

[pcornelissen]

Yes, but with the script you end up in rate limiting when you have many workflow runs

[piotrekkr]

Yes it is true. Although there is this sleep there :D

  # Sleep for 100ms to avoid rate limiting
  sleep 0.1

I'm working with github for more than 3 years now and I think there is a huge problem with project management at GitHub. There is almost nothing delivered that brings value to users. People are asking for basic and obvious features that should be implemented long ago and they are not implemented for years. There is a lot of weird design decisions that do not make much sense. Docs are unclear and lacking examples, UX is quite bad imho (I'm using refined github extension to make up for it). Not sure why this is the case, but Microsoft has tons of money and should be able to hire some competent people to improve.

[ofennell-quipex]

How is there not a proper solution for this yet

[Justin-JHG]

not sure this would work for everyone but it worked for me:

create an archived folder and move the workflow files to that folder on the default (e.g. main/master) branch of your repo

[onelapahead]

For my use case, I wanted to remove a Workflow entirely from the Actions UI. Removing workflows from the main branch of my repository was not sufficient, nor was deleting the logs of the workflows' runs (what is documented by GitHub here: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/monitoring-and-troubleshooting-workflows/using-workflow-run-logs#deleting-logs-programmatically).

So modeled after GitHub's logs script, and using wisdom from https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/26256#discussioncomment-8756475 I have this script that deletes all the runs from a workflow, and therefore will remove from it the UI once it completes:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# Delete all the runs for a given workflow
# Usage: delete-runs.sh <repository> <workflow-name>

set -oe pipefail

REPOSITORY=$1
WORKFLOW_NAME=$2

# Validate arguments
if [[ -z "$REPOSITORY" ]]; then
  echo "Repository is required"
  exit 1
fi

if [[ -z "$WORKFLOW_NAME" ]]; then
  echo "Workflow name is required"
  exit 1
fi

echo "Getting all completed runs for workflow $WORKFLOW_NAME in $REPOSITORY"

RUNS=$(
  gh api \
    -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" \
    -H "X-GitHub-Api-Version: 2022-11-28" \
    "/repos/$REPOSITORY/actions/workflows/$WORKFLOW_NAME/runs" \
    --paginate \
    --jq '.workflow_runs[] | select(.conclusion != "") | .id'
)

echo "Found $(echo "$RUNS" | wc -l) completed runs for workflow $WORKFLOW_NAME"

for RUN in $RUNS; do
  gh run delete --repo $REPOSITORY $RUN || echo "Failed to delete run $RUN"
  sleep 0.1
done

I'll edit the script if I find for workflows that had non-completed runs if it doesn't finish cleaning them up.

Hope this helps folks! GitHub please make this possible via the UI soon. It's a bit absurd its taken five years to prioritize creating a UI button and an API that in the backend just has to do the above 🤷🏻.

[kargaranamir]

I used this workflow to remove all previous workflow runs, and I am happy with it:

main project: https://github.com/Mattraks/delete-workflow-runs
my use: prune_workflow.yml

I hope this helps!

[iosdevben]

Upvote for a "Delete all runs" button.

[burnettk]

this last comment is a good reminder to actually upvote the first comment. just because you've commented or have been following this thread in your email for years doesn't necessarily mean you have actually upvoted the issue, which, if there is a metric they are looking at, that's probably it.

[piotrekkr]

I agree we should upvote first post but I'm not so convinced if this affect in any way what GH is planning to put inside new releases. There are discussions/issues with hundreds of upvotes not addressed for years. Probably also better to add a comment, so this discussion at least show on first page of discussions list from time to time and maybe it will be spotted by someone from GitHub (if there is anyone at all checking those discussions and have any power over GH release planning).

[leonardo-gomes-oceaneering]

Still not implemented?

It has been 4 years since ticket creation!!

[AHJiapengZhang]

I am also surprised this has been a 4-year-old problem unsolved! Resolved to use gh cli to delete, but still super inconvenient!

[ntotten]

I used this script and it works well

#!/bin/bash

# Fetch all run IDs for the specified workflow using --json for structured output
run_ids=$(gh run list --limit 500 --repo=zuplo/core --workflow=workflow-name.yaml --json databaseId | jq -r '.[].databaseId')

# Loop through each run ID and delete it
for run_id in $run_ids; do
    gh run delete $run_id --repo zuplo/core
done

[Funth0mas]

I remarked the gh has embedded jq support, so the command can be shortened to

gh run list --limit 500 --workflow workflow_name.yml --json databaseId -q ".[].databaseId"  | xargs -n 1 gh run delete

which works on Windows, too (note the xargs.exe is installed together with Git, for example)

[AHJiapengZhang]

This works!

[andrew-cogni]

 $ gh run --help
List, view, and watch recent workflow runs from GitHub Actions.

USAGE
  gh run <command> [flags]

CORE COMMANDS
  cancel:     Cancel a workflow run
  download:   Download artifacts generated by a workflow run
  list:       List recent workflow runs
  rerun:      Rerun a failed run
  view:       View a summary of a workflow run
  watch:      Watch a run until it completes, showing its progress

Apparently we can no longer gh run delete from the command line. We're going in the wrong direction here!

[Funth0mas]

Freshly downloaded gh 2.59 from https://github.com/cli/cli/releases/download/v2.59.0/gh_2.59.0_windows_amd64.zip has the delete option

[andrew-cogni]

:( I was on whatever my package manager had for stable 2.4

[mirsella]

can confirm gh version 2.59.0 (2024-10-16) from arch repo working fine. i did gh run list --limit 100 --workflow CI --json databaseId -q '.[].databaseId' | xargs -n1 gh run delete