How do you handle large monorepos with multiple services in GitHub Actions?

Large monorepos present two main problems: every commit triggers all CI jobs even when only one service changed, and a single workflow file becomes unmanageably large. The solution combines path filtering, dynamic matrices, and workflow decomposition.

Strategy 1 — Per-service workflow files with built-in path filters. Each service gets its own workflow file triggered only when its directory changes:

# .github/workflows/service-auth.yml
on:
  push:
    paths: ['services/auth/**', '.github/workflows/service-auth.yml']
  pull_request:
    paths: ['services/auth/**']

Strategy 2 — Centralised change detection with dorny/paths-filter. One workflow detects which services changed and gates subsequent jobs:

jobs:
  detect-changes:
    outputs:
      auth: ${{ steps.filter.outputs.auth }}
      payment: ${{ steps.filter.outputs.payment }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: dorny/paths-filter@v3
        id: filter
        with:
          filters: |
            auth: ['services/auth/**']
            payment: ['services/payment/**']

  build-auth:
    needs: detect-changes
    if: needs.detect-changes.outputs.auth == 'true'
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - run: ./build.sh auth

Strategy 3 — Dynamic matrix from changed services. A detection job produces a JSON array of changed service names, and a single build job consumes it as a matrix, avoiding N duplicated job blocks:

  build:
    needs: detect-changes
    strategy:
      matrix:
        service: ${{ fromJSON(needs.detect-changes.outputs.changed-services) }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - run: ./build.sh ${{ matrix.service }}

Additional tips: use concurrency: groups scoped to service + branch to prevent duplicate runs, cache aggressively per service, and consider GitHub Actions' repository-level reusable workflows to share build logic across all services without per-repo duplication.

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