GitHub Action
Git Tags to Workflow Dispatch
The idea to create this project was born from this discussion, where some people raised the desire to automate the process of defining the options for a workflow dispatch with the current tags from their repository.
Since GitHub does not offer this feature, I decided to create it myself. You can read an article from my blog explaining how it works here.
name: On tag creation
on:
workflow_dispatch:
push:
tags: # https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/25302
- '*'
jobs:
custom-action:
name: Update workflow dispatch tags
runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
strategy:
matrix:
files: [example-001.yml]
steps:
- name: Checkout repo
uses: actions/checkout@v4
with:
fetch-depth: 0 # to get the tags
- name: Get the repository tags
run: |
THIS_GIT_TAGS=$(git tag --sort -creatordate | tr '\n' ' ')
echo "Git tags: ${THIS_GIT_TAGS}"
echo "THIS_GIT_TAGS=${THIS_GIT_TAGS}" >> "${GITHUB_ENV}"
- name: Run custom action
uses: FsharpGHActions/git-tag-to-workflow-dispatch@master
with:
values-to-take: 5
workflow-file-name: ${{ matrix.files }}
workflow-yaml-key: 'version'
pull-request: true
# needs to be a PAT to update the workflows/ folder
github-token: ${{ secrets.PAT_GITHUB }}
git-tags: ${{ env.THIS_GIT_TAGS }}
base: 'main'| Input | Description | Default value |
|---|---|---|
| values-to-take | Let you specify how many tags to take. | -1 |
| workflow-file-name | Target workflow file name that must live under `.github/workflows/`. | |
| workflow-yaml-key | Specify the workflow YAML key that will be updated. | |
| github-token | PAT token with more information at Personal Access Token - PAT. | |
| git-tags | The repository tags from the newest to the oldest. Example Extract the tags. | |
| base | Sets the pull request base branch. Usually it’s ‘main’ or ‘master’. |
| Input | Description | Default value |
|---|---|---|
| pull-request | TODO. If ‘true’, create a PR; if false, commit directly. | ‘true’ |
Since this action creates a PR automatically that changes the contents of the repository workflows, it demands some special permissions, which are out of the scope of the GITHUB_TOKEN (the community discussion).
My recommendation is that you create a Fine-grained Personal Access Token with access only to the repositories you intend to use this action, and with permissions:
- Read access to metadata (this is enabled by default);
- Read and write access to code;
- Read and write access to pull requests;
- Read and write access to workflows.
Since there are many ways to extract the tags from the repository, I decided to not add this feature to the project, so you’re free to decide which one to use. For my examples, I use basically this approach:
jobs:
custom-action:
name: Update workflow dispatch tags
runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
steps:
- name: Checkout repo
uses: actions/checkout@v4
with:
fetch-depth: 0 # to get the tags
- name: Get the repository tags
run: |
THIS_GIT_TAGS=$(git tag --sort -creatordate | tr '\n' ' ')
echo "Git tags: ${THIS_GIT_TAGS}"
echo "THIS_GIT_TAGS=${THIS_GIT_TAGS}" >> "${GITHUB_ENV}"
# then you can use this environment variable when calling
# the custom actionFeel free to add your personal approach to this documentation.