How to Skip a Job on Forks in GitHub Actions

Forks run your scheduled and push workflows too, so a deploy job can fire from someone else fork unless you guard it.

Gate the job with an if that checks github.repository against your canonical owner/name so forks skip it.

Steps

• Decide which jobs must never run on a fork, such as deploys.
• Add an if expression checking github.repository equals your repo.
• Forks evaluate the condition false and skip the job.
• Keep build and test jobs unguarded so contributors still get CI.

Workflow

name: Skip On Fork
on: [push, schedule]
jobs:
  deploy:
    if: github.repository == 'acme/app'
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - run: ./deploy.sh

Notes

• Scheduled workflows do not run on forks at all, but push and dispatch can, so still guard those.
• Latchkey managed runners run your guarded upstream jobs cheaper and self-heal mid-run.

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