Close stale issues and PRs workflow (hbldh/bleak)

The Close stale issues and PRs workflow from hbldh/bleak, 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.

Grade your own workflow free or run it on Latchkey →

Source: hbldh/bleak.github/workflows/stale_issues.ymlLicense MITView source

What it does

This is the Close stale issues and PRs workflow from the hbldh/bleak 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: "37 1 * * 0"

jobs:
  stale:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/stale@v9
        with:
          days-before-stale: 500
          days-before-close: 100
          any-of-labels: "3rd party issue, more info required"
          stale-issue-message: This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had any activity for 500 days. It will be closed in 100 days if no further activity occurs.
          close-issue-message: This issue has been automatically closed because it has not had any activity for 100 days after being marked as stale.

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: "37 1 * * 0"
 
jobs:
  stale:
    timeout-minutes: 30
    runs-on: latchkey-small
    steps:
      - uses: actions/stale@v9
        with:
          days-before-stale: 500
          days-before-close: 100
          any-of-labels: "3rd party issue, more info required"
          stale-issue-message: This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it has not had any activity for 500 days. It will be closed in 100 days if no further activity occurs.
          close-issue-message: This issue has been automatically closed because it has not had any activity for 100 days after being marked as stale.

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