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Maven / GitHub Actions Interview Questions

How do you control job execution order in GitHub Actions using needs:?

needs: declares that a job must wait for one or more other jobs to succeed before it starts. This turns the default parallel fan-out into a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of dependencies, allowing you to model pipelines like build → test → deploy.

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: ./gradlew jar

  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    needs: build          # waits for build to succeed
    steps:
      - run: ./gradlew test

  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    needs: [build, test]  # waits for BOTH build and test to succeed
    steps:
      - run: ./deploy.sh

If any job listed in needs: fails, the dependent job is automatically skipped (not failed). You can override this with an explicit condition:

  notify:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    needs: deploy
    if: always()          # runs even if deploy failed
    steps:
      - run: ./notify-slack.sh

You can also check the result of a specific dependency using needs.<job-id>.result, which returns 'success', 'failure', 'cancelled', or 'skipped'. This lets downstream jobs make fine-grained decisions about what to do based on which upstream step passed or failed.

What happens to a job whose needs: dependency fails in a GitHub Actions workflow?
Which condition expression makes a job run regardless of whether its needs: dependency succeeded or failed?

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More Related questions...

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