Create a modern GitHub Action

Use this template to bootstrap the creation of a GitHub Action 🚀

This template includes compilation support, tests, a validation workflow, publishing, and versioning guidance.

If you are new, there's also a simpler introduction. See the Hello World JavaScript Action

Includes

• TypeScript
• ESLint
• Prettier
• yarn
• esbuild
• @swc/jest
• act
• VS Code settings

Requirements

• Node.js 16 or higher

Create an action from this template

Click the Use this Template and provide the new repo details for your action

Getting started

Install the dependencies

$ yarn

Install act to run GitHub Actions locally, which includes having Docker.

Test, build and run the action

$ yarn dev

Change action.yml

The action.yml defines the inputs and output for your action.

Update the action.yml with your name, description, inputs and outputs for your action.

See the documentation

Change the Code

Most toolkit and CI/CD operations involve async operations so the action is run in an async function.

import * as core from '@actions/core';
...

async function run() {
  try { 
      ...
  } 
  catch (error) {
    core.setFailed(error.message);
  }
}

run()

See the toolkit documentation for the various packages.

Publish to a distribution branch

Actions are run from GitHub repos so we will checkin the packed dist folder.

Then run ncc and push the results:

$ npm run package
$ git add dist
$ git commit -a -m "prod dependencies"
$ git push origin releases/v1

Your action is now published! 🚀

See the versioning documentation

Validate

You can now validate the action by referencing ./ in a workflow in your repo (see test.yml)

uses: ./
with:
  milliseconds: 1000

See the actions tab for runs of this action! 🚀

Usage

After testing you can create a v1 tag to reference the stable and latest V1 action

Debugging

core.debug() does only output if the debugging mode is enabled.

On GitHub you can enable it by setting the secret ACTIONS_STEP_DEBUG to true. _Note: You should hesitate to enable this on GitHub, because secrets may be printed while in debug mode.

If using act, you can enable it by passing the flag --verbose. Note: This does not currently work. Follow the related GitHub issue.

Using secrets locally

The .secrets file is a .env file placed in the root directory that is used to pass secrets to the GitHub Action while running it locally with act.