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ADR-0331: Skip CI on draft pull requests

  • Status: Accepted
  • Date: 2026-05-08
  • Deciders: lusoris
  • Tags: ci, build, fork-local

Context

The fork commonly has 10+ draft pull requests in flight at any one time, each rebased onto master repeatedly during review and bundling. The full CI matrix triggered on every push (~19 required checks plus several advisory lanes) currently fires on those draft pushes too, which doubles the CI bill against work the author still considers in-progress. The maintainer flagged the cost directly and asked for a single fix that stops the bleed across every workflow.

Decision

We will gate every fork workflow that triggers on pull_request so it no longer runs while the PR is in draft state. Concretely each affected pull_request block lists types: [opened, synchronize, reopened, ready_for_review] and every top-level job carries if: github.event_name != 'pull_request' || github.event.pull_request.draft == false. The ready_for_review event is the trigger that re-fires CI when an author marks a draft as ready, replacing the lost synchronize events. The second clause keeps push: triggers (where there is no PR object) intact.

Alternatives considered

Option Pros Cons Why not chosen
Per-job draft gate (chosen) Single uniform pattern across 8 workflows; safe fallback for push: events; honours GitHub's ready_for_review semantics so promotion fires CI exactly once. Adds two lines per job; aggregator skip leaves draft PRs in "missing required check" state, but drafts are unmergeable by design so the gate is moot. —
Concurrency-only (cancel old runs but still fire new ones) Already in place for most workflows. Does not stop the run, only deduplicates within a ref. Each draft push still consumes one full matrix. Rejected — does not address the cost driver.
No gate, rely on rebase-before-merge Zero workflow changes. The user explicitly asked for a CI-skip fix; ignoring the request and waiting for rebase doubles spend on every iteration. Rejected per direct user request.

Consequences

  • Positive: Draft PRs no longer consume CI minutes for the pull_request event. Promotion to ready-for-review fires the full matrix once via ready_for_review; subsequent synchronize events on the now-ready PR fire CI as before. push: events on master are unaffected.
  • Negative: A draft PR shows "Required check missing" against branch protection, but GitHub already blocks merging a draft PR by definition, so there is no merge-path regression. Developers cannot preview their CI status while the PR is still draft — they must promote to ready (or open a non-draft PR) to see green checks.
  • Neutral / follow-ups: docs/development/ci.md documents the gate so a future contributor opening a draft PR understands why no checks fire. ADR-0313's Required Checks Aggregator already lists ready_for_review in its types; this ADR codifies the same pattern across the rest of the workflow set.

References

  • Source: req — direct user direction (paraphrased): "stop GitHub Actions CI from running on draft pull requests across all 8 workflows; ~14 drafts are in flight and each one rebases before merge, doubling the CI bill."
  • ADR-0313 — the aggregator workflow already adopted the ready_for_review event; this ADR generalises the pattern.
  • ADR-0317 — companion CI cost fix (path filters for Docker / FFmpeg integration); same theme, different mechanism.