Is it possible to exclude a specific check from being required for deployment?

[redoz]

Details

We use branch-deploy to deploy to our dev environments and part of that deployment is to run our integration test suite. This test suite creates a check in github to indicate whether it succeeded or not, and this check is required to succeed for us to merge this branch into main.

Now, branch-deploy also requires all checks to pass before running the deployment, so we have a bit of a catch 22 if the integration tests fail, we cannot re-run the deployment without touching the branch to reset the failed check, which could trigger lengthy builds due to the content in the pull request.

In theory this isn't something that should be required, the tests fail, you should fix them before trying to re-run them, but unfortunately it can happen due to the complexity of the system and the tests that a test can fail due to an issue with an external dependency.

I think in effect what I'm asking for is an inverse to required_contexts, a way to opt out of a check being required for the deployment (even though it's required in the branch protection settings of the repository).

[GrantBirki]

👋 Hey @redoz thank you for opening this issue and sorry for the delay, I was traveling. I think your suggested approach makes a lot of sense. You are probably looking for a new feature where we have something like ignored_contexts in addition to the existing required_contexts so that certain CI checks can be disabled.

That could potentially take some time to implement. In the meantime, have you looked into the checks: "required" field? Perhaps you could make your acceptance test (for your dev env) not required and then use this branch-deploy setting.