Skipping a GitHub Actions step without failing#

I wanted to have a GitHub Action step run that might fail, but if it failed the rest of the steps should still execute and the overall run should be treated as a success.

continue-on-error: true does exactly that:

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    - name: Download previous database
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      run: curl --fail -o tils.db https://til.simonwillison.net/tils.db
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      continue-on-error: true
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    - name: Build database
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      run: python build_database.py

From this workflow

I’m using curl --fail here which returns an error code if the file download files (without --fail it was writing out a two line error message to a file called tils.db which is not what I wanted). Then continue-on-error: true to keep on going even if the download failed.

My build_database.py script updates the tils.db database file if it exists and creates it from scratch if it doesn’t.