Question

A platform team notices their CodeQL analysis workflow is frequently triggered multiple times in quick succession when developers push several commits to the same feature branch within minutes. This causes a backlog of queued CodeQL jobs, consuming Actions runner minutes and delaying results for the latest commit. The team wants to ensure that when a newer run starts for a branch, any in-progress or queued CodeQL runs for that same branch are automatically cancelled. Which change to the CodeQL workflow best achieves this?

Accepted Answer

Add a `concurrency` group keyed to the workflow and branch ref with `cancel-in-progress: true` at the workflow level.

Answer

Change the workflow trigger to `schedule` with a cron expression so only one scan runs per interval.

Answer

Set `strategy.max-parallel: 1` in the matrix so only one CodeQL job runs at a time.

Answer

Enable default setup instead of advanced setup so GitHub automatically deduplicates scan runs.