Disable actions for all forks by default

[evdcush]

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When you fork a repo, GitHub default copies the actions CI settings.
So when you fork a repo, you are also implicitly signing yourself up for notification/inbox spam from failed actions, for example:

Publish Nightly Version to PyPi workflow run failed for main branch

I know you can manually disable actions in a forked repo's settings by:

Click on repo > click on settings > Actions > General > Actions permissions > Disable actions > Save

This process is tedious and intractable if you have many forks.

Is there a GitHub setting to automatically disable actions for all repo forks (existing, updated, or newly forked)?

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[purejava]

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When you fork a repo, GitHub default copies the actions CI settings.

So when you fork a repo, you are also implicitly signing yourself up for notification/inbox spam from failed actions, for example:

Publish Nightly Version to PyPi workflow run failed for main branch

I know you can manually disable actions in a forked repo's settings by:

Click on repo > click on settings > Actions > General > Actions permissions > Disable actions > Save

This process is tedious and intractable if you have many forks.

Is there a GitHub setting to automatically disable actions for all repo forks (existing, updated, or newly forked)?

I read this post from Dusty and feel the same: https://fosstodon.org/@dpom/112844656108143163

GitHub should ask about CI when you fork a repo, rather than enabling Actions by default. If you fork a repo like VS Code, it runs (failing) CI every hour until you disable it in settings. The VS Code repo alone has 28k+ forks. How much compute are we wasting across the whole site?

AFAIK you mentioned the only option: disable actions at all. Or you can clone the repo, git rm the appropriate workflow yml file and push your changes.

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[nebuk89]

Hey, this is a cool ask. What is your goal or need for this? I would love to understand more.

[purejava]

Save the planet. Reduce unnecessary email to tell you that workflows have failed that you did not set up or do not need.

And reduce the resource needed to run the jobs themselves, of course.

[nebuk89]

So this is more about the crons in forks, as we do disable Actions by default on forks this is more around 'I want access to Actions to do some manual runs but I don't want the automated Actions to run'?

[purejava]

Yes, precicely.

I think there are actions that are run by cron and others that get triggered on pushes like codeQL. As good as they are and I set them up for all of my own repos, there is no use in that they come with a cloned repo.

CodeQL is commonly set up to check commits. So I clone a repo, add a feature to the code base, create a PR and on every commit I make:
a) codeQL is triggered and fails
b) an email is created notifying about that

From my point of view, both of the workflows mentioned above aren't needed on a cloned repo.

[nebuk89]

That's fair feedback. We have toyed with making some changes here in the past around having some new UX options for 'enable Actions but not automatic jobs'. I will add this to our backlog of paper cuts to look at, we have quite a few but we will get there :) Thanks for the engagement

[purejava]

Thank you too @nebuk89.
I opened a related suggestion here a while ago: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/133483