How to Trigger a Workflow on Push to Specific Branches in GitHub Actions

By Kaveh Alemi·Latchkey

A branches filter under the push event restricts the workflow to commits landing on the branches you list.

Add on.push.branches with a list of branch names or globs. A push to any other branch is ignored, so you avoid running CI on branches you do not care about.

Steps

• Add push: under on with a branches: list.
• List exact names (main) or globs (release/**).
• Push a commit to a matching branch to fire the run.

Workflow

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
      - 'release/**'
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npm ci && npm run build

Gotchas

• Use branches-ignore: for the inverse, but you cannot use both branches and branches-ignore in the same event.
• Branch globs use fnmatch syntax, so ** matches across slashes but * does not.

Verify it actually works

A workflow that runs is not a workflow that works. Confirm the behaviour on a real event rather than on a manual dispatch, because trigger conditions, permissions, and context values all differ between the two.

# 1. validate the file before pushing
docker run --rm -v "$(pwd):/repo" --workdir /repo rhysd/actionlint:latest -color

# 2. trigger the real event, not workflow_dispatch
git commit --allow-empty -m "ci: verify trigger" && git push

# 3. watch it and read the conclusion, not just the colour
gh run watch
gh run view --log-failed

What usually goes wrong first

• The workflow file must exist on the default branch before scheduled or dispatch triggers appear at all.
• GITHUB_TOKEN permissions default to read-only in many organisations. Declare a permissions: block listing every scope the job needs.
• Fork pull requests get a read-only token and no access to secrets, regardless of workflow configuration.
• actions/checkout gives you depth 1 on a detached HEAD, so anything needing history or a branch name needs fetch-depth: 0.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

References

• GitHub Actions documentation