Question on queue: max and failure to queue jobs

[truboxl]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Question

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Other

Discussion Details

Hi, we currently having issue try to integrate "queue: max" in our workflow and but we fail to debug what went wrong.

What we want:
Only pull requests job run will be limited to newest push, all older jobs will be cancelled
Upload jobs should be queued and run once at a time

The following upload jobs are cancelled instead of being queued
https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/actions/runs/35399365318/attempts/1
https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/actions/runs/35399462957/attempts/1

The workflow file:
https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/blob/master/.github/workflows/packages.yml

concurrency:
  # if this is a PR event, group = "pr-<number>", otherwise group = run_id so it never collides with other runs
  group: ${{ github.event_name == 'pull_request' && format('pr-{0}', github.event.pull_request.number) || github.run_id }}
  # only cancel in-progress when it’s a PR
  cancel-in-progress: ${{ github.event_name == 'pull_request' }}
  # invalid when cancel-in-progress: true and queue: max
  queue: ${{ github.event_name == 'pull_request' && 'single' || 'max' }}

[Kxrma47]

The cancellation is from a second concurrency group: your jobs.upload.concurrency: ${{ github.workflow }}, not the workflow-level group you showed. That job-level shorthand retains the default queue: single, so each new pending upload replaces the previous pending upload. Change only the upload job:

jobs:
  upload:
    concurrency:
      group: ${{ github.workflow }}-upload
      cancel-in-progress: false
      queue: max

Keep the workflow-level PR cancellation rule as-is. GitHub documents that queue: max applies independently at the job or workflow level (up to 100 pending jobs); it cannot be paired with cancel-in-progress: true. Concurrency docs