Keeping status checks up to date would be easier if the required status checks could be a wildcard

[leighmcculloch]

Keeping status checks up to date would be easier if the required status checks could be a wildcard.

It's already possible to wildcard on branches, which is super useful for defining a small number of protection rules that apply to multiple branches.

It would be equally useful if wildcards were supported in the status checks too, so that I could say that status checks with name test * are required, that way all the test jobs with all their matrix values are automatically required to pass.

I work in a repo https://github.com/stellar/go that have some growing matrix setups, and the names for the checks are getting really long and have to be updated by an admin every time we add a new matrix value.

[ethomson]

Thanks @leighmcculloch - I can see how this would be useful indeed. I'll make sure that this is on the backlog.

[lee5i3]

I agree, we have some of our status checks plans from Terraform Cloud, it would be nice to be able to only have a status check if all of them pass, not having to specify each workspace

[mistercrunch]

Also need this. I like the flexibility of the support for a wildcard/regex, but I'd like to say that supporting the job name of the matrix itself seems important too. It's not intuitive that required_status_checks has a mix of pure job names AND "matrix instances" with a special formatting. I'd say most users would expect consistency is the input being job name and not job instances. Also I doubt people have only a subset of matrix instances that are required, in most cases the requirement is that the whole matrix passes the checks.

[seemethere]

It's actually weird that Github doesn't directly support this. You would think this would be a baseline feature for required status checks otherwise it's basically useless for anyone with a testing matrix larger than 1.

[mistercrunch]

Recently migrated a project that had many actions with a python matrix of ["3.9", "3.10"] to ["3.10", "3.11"] and it's easy to trip all over yourself. You have to create no-op fake actions to satisfy the condition, and once it lands you have to rebase every open PR to align the jobs with the checks that are then on your main branch. To work around this we moved to calling the matrix ["current", "next"] so it'd be easier next time, but being able to have a wildcard on the check would be good.

Oh other request while I'm here, would be some sort of "required, but only if triggered". Use case is say I have a folder backend/ and frontend/ and a unit test suite for each. I want to only trigger each suite if something has changed in the corresponding folder, and I want it to be required to pass, but only if it ran. Currently there's no easy way to specify this, you have to add some sort of no-op logic in your actions or other hacks.

[gunar]

I agree, we have some of our status checks plans from Terraform Cloud, it would be nice to be able to only have a status check if all of them pass, not having to specify each workspace

@lee5i3, did you end up implementing this? Did it work? If then, are you able to share some code? Thanks in advance.

[sebastian-fredriksson-bernholtz]

There are a lot of related discussions, as well as workarounds and community solutions around this.

I can recommend https://github.com/upsidr/merge-gatekeeper (referred in https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/26251) that allows you to specify a single workflow that will fail if any of the other checks triggered on a commit fails. It basically acts as a wildcard would, but it also allows you to explicitly specify workflows/checks to ignore (ie ones you don't want to be blocking).

It basically does what you would expect the built-in check would be doing: block if any triggered check fails. Would be nice if github added native support for it though.