CI: concurrency groups that mention github.ref all collapse into one group per ref #1

• 
  @ogirardot opened this issue · Sep 3, 2026

  Two workflows in the same repo with different concurrency groups that both use the ${{ github.ref }} idiom cancel each other.

  Observed on rickub/cli: ci.yml has group: ci-${{ github.ref }} and a new security.yml had group: security-${{ github.ref }}, both cancel-in-progress: true. On one push to main, the Security run started and CI run #15 was cancelled with no reason shown (RC, whose group is the literal rc, was unaffected).

  Cause (web/ci_dispatch.go, concurrencyGroup): any raw group containing the substring github.ref is replaced by "ref:" + ref, discarding the rest of the expression. So ci-…, security-…, and even ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.ref }} all become the same key. GitHub substitutes the expression inside the string instead, so the prefixes keep the groups distinct.

  Expected: substitute ${{ github.ref }} (and github.ref_name, github.workflow, …) within the group string rather than collapsing the whole group to the ref, or at minimum key the group on <workflow> + ref.

  Workaround used in rickub/cli: a verbatim group name per workflow.

• 
  @ogirardot · Sep 3, 2026

  Moved to rickub/rickub#192 (the server repo); closing here.

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