GitHub - How to delete all workflow runs

GitHub - How to delete all workflow runs.md

While GitHub provides the ability to remove old workflow runs (https://github.blog/changelog/2020-07-07-github-actions-ability-to-delete-workflow-runs/), it fails to provide an option to delete all workflow runs for a particular workflow.

Manual deletion can become extremely tedious...

Turns out, this can be achieved using GitHub CLI (https://github.com/cli/cli), read on.

• Idea initially noticed here: refined-github/refined-github#4838

• Which brought me here: cli/cli#6449 where this solution in given:

  gh run \
    list --json databaseId  -q '.[].databaseId' -w integration.yml --limit 500 \
    | xargs -IID -P 15 \
      gh api "repos/$(gh repo view --json nameWithOwner -q .nameWithOwner)/actions/runs/ID" \
      -X DELETE
  

For posterity, here is the original message (the solution) posted by @fregante :

@alef that works but it's excruciatingly slow on my end 😬 like 30 seconds per 20 deletions.
Adding -P 8 to xargs considerably sped it up!

Here's the full command I'm using to delete:

• only integration.yml
• up to 500 at per run
• up to 15 parallel requests

gh run list --json databaseId  -q '.[].databaseId' -w integration.yml --limit 500 |
        xargs -IID -P 15 gh api \
              "repos/$(gh repo view --json nameWithOwner -q .nameWithOwner)/actions/runs/ID" \
              -X DELETE

This only took 50 seconds per 500 deletions, which is much more reasonable. I deleted 1700 runs in
a few runs, but I reached the API limit so I had to stop it and wait a few more seconds 👍

I am @fregante and I approve this message 😂