GitHub Action workflow not running

Is your branch master or main?

It might be silly in the future but as for October 2020 just keep in mind that the default GitHub branch has been renamed from master to main (source)

So if you are copypasting actions from elsewhere, make sure that you are targeting the correct branch (for new repos this means most of the time to replace master with main in the .yml workflow files).

If you are targeting the wrong branch, the name of the action will appear on GitHub but no actions will actually run.

Hope this helps someone during this transition!


So as found in the comment below the post itself, if you want the workflow to run on branch x the .github folder must be on branch x and any other branch you want to trigger the workflow from


I ran into this issue and none of the answers were helping. It just wouldn't run and didn't make sense why. Until I found out there was a Github actions outage. Check https://www.githubstatus.com/