How to Queue Release Jobs So They Never Overlap in GitHub Actions

One shared concurrency group across every release trigger queues publishes so two never run at once.

Releases often fire from both tag pushes and manual dispatch. Put them all in the same group with cancel-in-progress: false so a second release waits behind the first instead of racing it.

Steps

• Trigger the release from all relevant events.
• Use one static concurrency.group shared by every trigger.
• Set cancel-in-progress: false so an in-progress publish finishes.

Workflow

on:
  push:
    tags: ['v*']
  workflow_dispatch:
concurrency:
  group: release-publish
  cancel-in-progress: false
jobs:
  publish:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npm publish

Gotchas

• Only one release can be pending; a third trigger cancels the earlier pending one, so avoid bursting releases.
• A registry that rejects duplicate versions still needs distinct version numbers per release.

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