Preserve Queued Jobs in Concurrency Groups

[Ariastarcos]

Why are you starting this discussion?

Product Feedback

What GitHub Actions topic or product is this about?

Workflow Deployment

Discussion Details

Feature Request: Preserve Queued Jobs in Concurrency Groups

Problem

When using concurrency with cancel-in-progress: false, GitHub Actions still cancels previously queued jobs when new jobs arrive in the same group, with the message: "Cancelling since a higher priority waiting request exists".

This breaks use cases where:

• Jobs are serialized by host-level mutual exclusion (locks, shared resources)
• Multiple jobs targeting the same server should queue and execute sequentially
• Cancellation of queued jobs causes data loss or resource conflicts

Current Behavior

concurrency:
  group: action-${{ matrix.teleport_host }}
  cancel-in-progress: false

Job 1 runs → Job 2 queues → Job 3 arrives → Job 2 is cancelled ❌

Desired Behavior

Job 1 runs → Job 2 queues → Job 3 arrives → Job 2 remains queued ✅

The docs make no mention of any configuration options to achieve this behavior.

Suggested Solution

Add a cancel-queued option to concurrency configuration:

concurrency:
  group: action-${{ matrix.teleport_host }}
  cancel-in-progress: false
  cancel-queued: false  # NEW: prevent cancelling queued jobs

I have done a search for similar discussions, but this discussion hasn't seen any official replies in years, despite close to 1k upvotes. Regardless, bumping the issue there as well.

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