let people define progress in ci steps

[castdrian]

Why are you starting this discussion?

Product Feedback

What GitHub Actions topic or product is this about?

Metrics & Insights

Discussion Details

it'd be nice if non github-pages jobs could also be configured to display the progress bar, either automatically based on the amount of jobs in the workflow or manually by defining percentages per step

[github-actions[bot]]

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[girishlade111]

That is an excellent feature request. The progress bar for GitHub Pages deployments is a great piece of UI, and it's frustrating that this kind of feedback isn't available for other types of jobs.

What's Happening Now

As you've noticed, the progress bar shown in your screenshot is a special indicator that only appears for jobs that are deploying to GitHub Pages, typically using the official actions/deploy-pages action. It's a hardcoded feature for that specific deployment target, not a general tool that can be used for any job.

Why Your Idea is a Great Feature Request

You are right that a generic progress bar would be a massive improvement for monitoring CI/CD pipelines. For long-running jobs with many steps—like a complex build, a lengthy test suite, or a deployment to AWS or Azure—the current spinner icon doesn't provide much information.

Knowing that a job is 40% complete versus 90% complete is a huge difference and provides much more valuable, real-time feedback.

How It Could Work

Your suggestions on how to implement this are spot on:

Automatic Progress: For jobs with a set number of steps, GitHub could automatically calculate progress (e.g., "Step 4 of 10 complete").

Manual Progress: Allowing developers to manually define percentages for each step would be even more powerful, as some steps (like npm install) are fast, while others (npm run e2e-tests) can take up the majority of the job's runtime.

This is a fantastic piece of product feedback. The more people who ask for features like this, the more likely it is that the GitHub Actions team will prioritize it. Thanks for sharing the idea!

[castdrian]

thanks for the useless input ChatGPT