Close stale issues and PRs workflow (doitintl/kube-no-trouble)

The Close stale issues and PRs workflow from doitintl/kube-no-trouble, explained and optimized by Latchkey.

CI health: A - excellent

Point runs-on at Latchkey and get job timeouts, self-healing for flaky steps, and up to 58% lower cost, applied automatically.

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Source: doitintl/kube-no-trouble.github/workflows/stale.yamlLicense MITView source

What it does

This is the Close stale issues and PRs workflow from the doitintl/kube-no-trouble repository, a real project running GitHub Actions. It is shown here with attribution under its MIT license.

Below, Latchkey shows a faster, safer version produced by its optimization engine.

The workflow

workflow (.yml)

name: 'Close stale issues and PRs'
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '30 1 * * *'

jobs:
  stale:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/stale@v9
        with:
          exempt-issue-labels: 'awaiting-approval,work-in-progress,not-stale'
          exempt-pr-labels: 'awaiting-approval,work-in-progress,not-stale'
          days-before-stale: 60
          days-before-close: 30
          stale-issue-message: 'This issue has not seen any activity in last 60 days, and has been marked as stale.'
          stale-pr-message: 'This PR has not seen any activity in last 60 days and has been marked as stale'
          close-issue-message: 'This issue was closed because it has been stalled for 90 days with no activity.'
          close-pr-message: 'This PR was closed because it has been stalled for 90 days with no activity.'

The same workflow, on Latchkey

Removes redundant runs and caps runaway jobs. Added and changed lines are highlighted.

name: 'Close stale issues and PRs'
on:
  schedule:
    - cron: '30 1 * * *'
 
jobs:
  stale:
    timeout-minutes: 30
    runs-on: latchkey-small
    steps:
      - uses: actions/stale@v9
        with:
          exempt-issue-labels: 'awaiting-approval,work-in-progress,not-stale'
          exempt-pr-labels: 'awaiting-approval,work-in-progress,not-stale'
          days-before-stale: 60
          days-before-close: 30
          stale-issue-message: 'This issue has not seen any activity in last 60 days, and has been marked as stale.'
          stale-pr-message: 'This PR has not seen any activity in last 60 days and has been marked as stale'
          close-issue-message: 'This issue was closed because it has been stalled for 90 days with no activity.'
          close-pr-message: 'This PR was closed because it has been stalled for 90 days with no activity.'

What changed

Run on Latchkey managed runners with one line (runs-on), which apply the fixes below automatically and self-heal transient failures. This example uses latchkey-small; pick the runner size that fits the job.
Add a job timeout so a hung step cannot burn hours of runner time.

This workflow runs 1 job per trigger. On Latchkey the same minutes cost up to 58% less than GitHub-hosted, with zero queue time.

Actions used in this workflow

actions/stale