Limiting paths that trigger Github Actions

Been spending the day experimenting with Github Actions today on a repository that contains multiple backend projects, as well as a front end project. Unfortunately (for investigation another time) the build time is quite slow for the UI. Thankfully we tend to make more backend changes than we do frontend changes and don’t always wait for that pipeline to finish before moving on to working with the deployed code.

Thankfully GitHub provide a perfect solution to this problem, not triggering that action if certain files haven’t changed.

on:
  push:
    paths:
      - '**.js'

Bingo, no more pointless UI (or any GitHub action really) builds. More information about the syntax, including including/excluding paths is here