🎸 cron-holiday

This GitHub Action prevents scheduled workflows from running on specific dates (like company holidays or national breaks). It checks if the current day matches a list of YYYY-MM-DD holidays and outputs on_holiday=true so you can conditionally skip jobs — or stop the run altogether.

“This is the dawning of the rest of our lives... on holiday.”

-- Green Day, probably talking about CI/CD

Tutorial: Getting Started

This tutorial will help you set up cron-holiday in your GitHub Actions workflow to skip jobs on holidays.

1. Add the Action to your workflow:

   jobs:
     check-holiday:
       uses: lowlydba/[email protected]
       with:
         holidays: "2025-01-01,2025-07-04,2025-12-25"
         timezone: "America/New_York"
         fail-on-holiday: false
       id: holiday
   
     your-job:
       if: ${{ steps.holiday.outputs.on_holiday != 'true' }}
       runs-on: ubuntu-latest
       steps:
         - run: echo "Doing useful work... because it's not a holiday!"

2. Commit and push your workflow file. Your workflow will now skip jobs on the specified holidays.

---

How-to Guide: Common Tasks

Skip a Job on Holidays

• Use the output on_holiday to conditionally run jobs:

  if: ${{ steps.holiday.outputs.on_holiday != 'true' }}

Fail the Workflow on Holidays

• Set fail-on-holiday: true to make the workflow fail if today is a holiday:

  with:
    fail-on-holiday: true

Use a Custom Timezone

• Specify the timezone input to match your region:

  with:
    timezone: "Europe/London"

---

Reference

Inputs

Name	Required	Description
holidays	✅	A comma-separated list of dates in YYYY-MM-DD format.
timezone	❌	IANA timezone name (e.g. America/New_York). Defaults to UTC.
fail-on-holiday	❌	If true, fails the job when today is a holiday. Defaults to false.

Note

Any non-IANA timezone will be treated as UTC. If you need to use a specific timezone, ensure it is an IANA timezone name.

Outputs

Name	Description
on_holiday	"true" if today is a holiday in the specified timezone, otherwise "false"

---

Explanation

Why Use cron-holiday?

If your company avoids deployments or data processing on certain days, cron-holiday acts as a single gatekeeper. Instead of adding date checks to every workflow or manually enabling/disabling jobs, use this action to short-circuit jobs early and keep your CI/CD process clean and reliable.

You can set the holidays as a repository or organization level environment variable, or even use a shared configuration file to manage holidays across multiple workflows.

Naming Note

"On holiday!" - not just a practical check, but a nod to the Green Day song. We believe your CI deserves some punk rock energy, and you the day off.

Default Holidays

If you do not specify the holidays input, it defaults to the USA Federal Holidays for 2025:

• 2025-01-01 (New Year's Day)
• 2025-01-20 (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day)
• 2025-02-17 (Washington’s Birthday)
• 2025-05-26 (Memorial Day)
• 2025-06-19 (Juneteenth National Independence Day)
• 2025-07-04 (Independence Day)
• 2025-09-01 (Labor Day)
• 2025-10-13 (Columbus Day)
• 2025-11-11 (Veterans Day)
• 2025-11-27 (Thanksgiving Day)
• 2025-12-25 (Christmas Day)

You can override this by specifying your own list of dates in the holidays input.