GitHub workflow is not triggered after pushing tags?

Question

I have a GitHub workflow as below.

name: Releaser

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - 'v*.*.*'

This workflow will be triggered when I manually push a new tag like v1.1.1-rc1. It works fine.

Now, I want to have another workflow to replace the "manually push".

name: sync-tags

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  push:
    paths:
      - TAGS

jobs:
  steps:
    - name: foo-example
      uses: foo-example 

This workflow will be triggered when there's a change made in the TAGS directory. The jobs will create a new tag like v1.1.1-rc1. It works fine as well. But, after the v1.1.1-rc1 is created by the sync-tags, the Releaser is not triggered.

I was wondering why the Releaser can be triggered by manually pushing tags but can't be triggered by tagging from other workflows?

Answer 1

I am having this same problem. It turns out this is intentional behavior from GitHub Actions.

… if a workflow run pushes code using the repository's GITHUB_TOKEN, a new workflow will not run even when the repository contains a workflow configured to run when push events occur.

Explicitly invoking the release workflow works! (Note: this needs GITHUB_TOKEN in the environment, which I happen to do for the entire workflow.)

      - name: New tag & launch release process
        run: |
          echo "Tagging $new_tag"
          git tag $new_tag
          git push --tags
          # Explicitly run our release workflow for this new tag
          gh workflow run release.yml --ref $new_tag

My release workflow needed to be enhanced to allow manual runs. The workflow_dispatch: line in the on: section.

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - 'v*.*.*'
  workflow_dispatch:

To make sure we're building a release on a tag, I added if: github.ref_type == 'tag' to each job within the release workflow.