How to read github PR template during build?

I don’t have a perfect answer for you, but one thought is that this may be somewhat hard to accomplish in a perfect / clean way with CircleCI, because I don’t believe it’s possible to have it sync every time the PR description (or comments) are added / edited the way you might be able to with GHA.

If the goal is to skip that test based on the state of the PR description when the PR is first opened, and the project has “only build pull requests” set, you might be able to write a shell script to

  • get the PR description for the current PR
  • run the test if the description matches a specific regex or
  • if not, exit 0

but in that case, the step would show up as passed vs skipped.

You could possibly use setup workflows and advanced logic to set a parameter in an initial step, then pass that to run a downstream workflow conditionally. I think you’d have the same limitation where the workflow would only trigger again if the branch were pushed to, or the workflow explicitly triggered.

A hackier way that might or might not work for your use case would be to key on branch name (i.e., skip a workflow if the branch name matches a particular pattern).