How to skip GitHub Actions job on push event?

Question

With Travis CI, we can skip the build for a particular commit with adding a suffix to a commit. This is described at Travis CI. I find this feature practical when I only edit README.md which is not code-related and the pre-flight build doesn't need to be triggered.

[skip ci]

How do I skip the jobs trigged on: push events using GitHub Actions?

name: Maven Build
on: [push]

jobs:
  build:

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - name: Check-out project
      uses: actions/checkout@v1
    - name: Set up JDK 11.0.3
      uses: actions/setup-java@v1
      with:
        java-version: 11.0.3
    - name: Build with Maven
      run: mvn -B package --file pom.xml

---

Answers summary:

Big thanks to all the answerers providing various ways to achieve it. I bet everybody would need something a little bit different regarding to the origin of their problem and the CI approach. Here are the answers listed for a quick navigation:

• Skip CI on readme.md file: https://stackoverflow.com/a/61876395/3764965
• Skip CI on [skip ci] as a new GitHub feature:
  • https://stackoverflow.com/a/66156840/3764965 (answer here)
  • https://stackoverflow.com/a/66114678/3764965 (answer in another question)
• Skip CI on [skip ci] message by parsing (customizable solution):
  • https://stackoverflow.com/a/59775665/3764965
• Allow CI per specific branch: https://stackoverflow.com/a/61876395/3764965

^{All the answers deserve upvote! If you like my question, you should double-like the answers.}

Answer 1

Also, for files and directories you want ignored on all pushes you can configure the workflow itself:

on:
  push:
    paths-ignore:
    - 'README.md'