Run CI once per pull request commit

Remove overlapping push and pull request triggers so each change receives one intended validation run.

Prompt

Evaluate and apply this CI technique to my repository: Run CI once per pull request commit.

Remove overlapping push and pull request triggers so each change receives one intended validation run.

Read the technique and its source-backed company examples: https://starsling.dev/ci-playbooks/techniques/run-ci-once.md

Inspect this repository’s CI workflows, build and test commands, dependencies, and recent run timings. Identify where this technique applies and explain the expected benefit using this repository’s evidence.
Measure a baseline from recent comparable runs: elapsed time, queue time, runner minutes and failures where available. If data is unavailable, say what cannot be measured.
Compare relevant company approaches, checking prerequisites, platform differences and tradeoffs. Rank applicable options by evidence, fit and measurable opportunity; do not present company results as predictions for this repo.
Recommend the smallest safe change, show what checks and fallback paths remain, and ASK ME WHICH CHANGE TO APPROVE BEFORE EDITING ANY FILES.
Only after approval, work on a new feature branch, make one reversible change, and open a reviewable pull request. Never merge or push to a default or protected branch.
Keep required checks, test coverage, deployment and release behavior intact. Validate the change and compare equivalent runs where possible; report limitations and what should be monitored after merge.

View all playbooks

How companies used this technique

Read what each company changed and follow the original sources.

Run CI once per change

Anthropic reports more CI jobs in a given day. As a StarSling pattern for GitHub Actions, removing duplicate push and pull_request runs and metadata-only triggers keeps each change to one run.

Use it when: Run history shows duplicate events for the same commit, or metadata events rerun checks that do not depend on that metadata.
Before applying it: Preview deployments, cache warming, release side effects and metadata-dependent checks keep the triggers they need.

Run each pull-request commit once

The Ruby extension's workflow ran on every push and every pull request, so each in-repo branch got two identical runs; for one commit they started three seconds apart. Shopify/vscode-shopify-ruby#808 limits push to main and adds a concurrency group whose cancellation applies only to pull_request events, so a main run that is already running is never cancelled, though a main run still waiting in the same group is replaced by a newer push.

Merged 2026-09-18; the workflow on the default branch is unchanged since. Source

Use it when: The same commit runs equivalent validation through both push and pull_request, and developers push several times in a row.
Before applying it: Check that the two runs test the same ref with the same permissions before treating them as duplicates.

Run push builds only on the default branch

target-determinator's presubmit workflow ran on every push and on every pull request, so a commit pushed to a pull request branch in the repository ran the test matrix twice. The change restricts the push trigger to main; pull requests still run through the pull_request event.

Use it when: A workflow triggers on both push and pull_request, and the push trigger covers every branch.
Before applying it: Branches without a pull request no longer get push builds; the workflow keeps workflow_dispatch for running them by hand.

How companies used this technique

Run CI once per change

Run each pull-request commit once

Run push builds only on the default branch

Related techniques

Cancel superseded pull request runs

Reject irrelevant events before allocating runners

Package once, and build full installers after merge

Company Playbooks

Related guides

Cancel superseded CI runs

Build and test only what changed

Cut CI queue time

Filter workflows by changed files

Bound runner jobs with timeouts

Right-size GitHub Actions runners