Exclude an exit code in github actions workflow result status

Question

I have a workflow which in one of its steps, if the command finishes with exit code 1 (failure), I want to run the next command/job (fix the problem which caused previous command failure), but I don't want that exit code 1 to affect the workflow result status.
In this situation, if I have exit code 1, even if I fix the problem, the result status will be failure, but I want the result status to be success if the second command fixed the problem.
Is this possible?

Here is my workflow.yml:
\

name: autoblack
on: [pull_request, push]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Set up Python 3.8
        uses: actions/[email protected]
        with:
          python-version: 3.8
      - name: Install Black
        run: pip3 install git+git://github.com/psf/black
        
      - name: Run black --check .
        run: black --check .
  
  reformat:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    needs: [build]
    if: always() && (needs.build.result == 'failure')
    steps:
      - uses: actions/[email protected]
      - name: Set up Python 3.8
        uses: actions/[email protected]
        with:
          python-version: 3.8
      - name: Install Black
        run: pip3 install git+git://github.com/psf/black
      - name: If needed, commit black changes to the pull request
        env:
          NEEDS_CONTEXT: ${{ toJSON(needs) }}
        run: |
          black --fast .
          git config --global user.name 'autoblack'
          git config --global user.email '[email protected]'
          git remote set-url origin https://x-access-token:${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}@github.com/$GITHUB_REPOSITORY
          git checkout $GITHUB_HEAD_REF
          echo "$NEEDS_CONTEXT"
          git commit -am "fixup: Format Python code with Black"
          git push
          echo "$NEEDS_CONTEXT"

If the job build with command run: black --check . has exit code 1, I want to run the job reformat to fix the problem and push that to the repository. The second job works fine, but the final result label is failure!!

Answer 1

The continue-on-error attribute of the step (also available on the job) can be used to prevent a job from failing when a step fails.

Then the steps context contains a steps.<step_id>.outcome that can be used in expressions to determine if the prior step failed. For example, in the workflow below I have a step that will fail when the commitlint command fails, but it uses continue-on-error to allow the workflow to continue:

      - name: commitlint
        id: commitlint
        continue-on-error: true
        run: |
          npx commitlint --from ${{ github.event.pull_request.base.sha }} --to ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.sha }} --verbose

Then the subsequent two steps will apply or remove a label based on the commitlint step's success/failure outcome:

      - name: label when commitlint fails
        if: ${{ steps.commitlint.outcome == 'failure' }}
        uses: andymckay/[email protected]
        with:
          add-labels: "commit-message-rule-violation"

      - name: label removal when commitlint succeeds
        if: ${{ steps.commitlint.outcome == 'success' }}
        uses: andymckay/[email protected]
        with:
          remove-labels: "commit-message-rule-violation"

The workflow ultimately succeeds regardless of whether the commitlint step fails or not due to continue-on-error: true.

The complete working workflow for this is here