How to Move Heavy CI Jobs to Nightly Instead of Per-Push

Running a two-hour suite on every push repeats near-identical work dozens of times a day.

Some suites are slow and rarely catch a regression on a single commit. Running them once per night, plus on demand, keeps their coverage while removing the many redundant per-push executions that dominate their cost.

Steps

• Split fast checks (unit, lint) from slow suites (full e2e, fuzz, load).
• Keep fast checks on push and pull_request for developer feedback.
• Move slow suites to on.schedule with workflow_dispatch for on-demand runs.

Workflow

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 3 * * *'   # 03:00 UTC nightly
  workflow_dispatch:
jobs:
  full-e2e:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npm ci && npm run test:e2e:full

Tradeoffs

• A nightly regression is found up to a day later than a per-push one.
• Keep a smoke subset on PRs so obvious breakage is still caught immediately.

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