Command to early-exit the job and set check conclusion

[ylemkimon]

Describe the enhancement
Currently to skip the rest of steps during a job, an if condition has to be added to all of steps or steps have to be moved to another job.

It'd be nice to have a command to early-exit (premature, prematurely, graceful, gracefully) (end, finish, terminate, termination, stop, halt, skip, cancel, discontinue, fail) the job during a step without failing the job:

::exit::

It'd be also nice to set the conclusion of early-exited job:

::exit::failure

(equivalent to exit 1)
or

::exit::neutral

(equivalent to exit 78 in Actions v1)
and other check conclusions.

This would help save build time for both GitHub and customers.

Additional information

Related StackOverflow and GitHub Community posts:

• How to fail a job in Github Actions?
• How to force to exit in Github Actions step
• How to write a GitHub Action with a neutral Check Run status
• How to perform an early clean exit of a job ?
• Early successful termination of job
• Github Action Skip Steps/Fall Through Syntax

Related issues:

• Has the setNeutral method been removed? toolkit#146
• https://github.com/veggiemonk/skip-commit

Other CIs:

• CircleCI: circleci-agent step halt
• Travis CI: travis_terminate
• AppVeyor: appveyor exit (Linux)
• Jenkins: currentBuild.result
• GitLab CI: exit 0

[a-tokyo]

This is really useful and is quite needed!

[remorses]

This is useful to not repeat the same if statement many times, you can instead do an early exit

[christian-kreuzberger-dtx]

This would be a great addition. Right now I have a pre-condition that I can only check in a bash-script, and I'm exiting with exit 1 for a purpose. However, in my PR it shows up as a failure :(

[bartlettroscoe]

I can't believe GHA does not support this. I guess you need to just implement and entire job as one big step run by your own driver script and then you can put whatever logic you want in that script to terminate early and with a zero exist (and a nice informational message). Is that the only current workaround for this?

GHA seems to be a new unique declarative language with somewhat limited functionality.