Discussion: Add concurrency control to the three daily scheduled workflows?

[Maanvi212006]

The following three workflows run daily on a schedule:

• .github/workflows/update-metadata.yml
• .github/workflows/generate-reports.yml
• .github/workflows/consolidate-metadata.yml

None of them currently have a concurrency block.

Proposed change:

Add this at the top of each workflow:

concurrency:
group: ${{ github.workflow }}
cancel-in-progress: true

Benefits:

• Prevents two instances of the same workflow from running at the same time.
• Cancels the older run if a new one starts.
• Avoids potential git push conflicts and race conditions on JSON files.

[utkarsh232005]

Manual test runs might get abruptly interrupted if a scheduled run kicks off at the same time.

[Maanvi212006]

Hi @utkarsh232005 ,
Thanks for pointing that out!

Yes, the main goal is to prevent overlapping scheduled runs.
To avoid cancelling manual test runs, we can use:

concurrency:
group: ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.event_name }}
cancel-in-progress: true

This way, scheduled and manual runs are treated separately.

[utkarsh232005]

Protects manual test runs, but risks git conflicts if a manual and scheduled run overlap.

[Maanvi212006]

You're right — even with separate groups, there's still a small chance of git conflicts if a manual run and a scheduled run overlap and try to edit the same files.
I considered two approaches:

1. Conditional cancel: This protects manual test runs from being cancelled, but still allows scheduled + manual runs to run simultaneously (small risk of conflict).
   concurrency:
   group: ${{ github.workflow }}
   cancel-in-progress: ${{ github.event_name != 'workflow_dispatch' }}

2. Separate groups (what I originally proposed): This cleanly separates manual and scheduled runs so they don't cancel each other.
   concurrency:
   group: $$ {{ github.workflow }}- $${{ github.event_name }}
   cancel-in-progress: true

Since this repo isn't very high-traffic and overlaps are rare, I prefer the second one — it's simpler and cleaner.
What do you think?
cc @jonesbusy — would love your opinion on this.