Use Custom Inputs in your GitHub Action

#github #githubactions #devops #tutorial

GitHub Actions are a powerful tool to automate your workflow. They can be used to run tests, deploy your code, publish a package, and much more.

The cool thing is, there's a GitHub Actions Marketplace where you can find a lot of actions created by... the community.

But what if you can't find the action you need? You can create your own and publish it there!

How to use this tutorial

Chapter 3: Reading inputs

Let's make our action a bit more interesting by reading an input from the workflow.

Add inputs to the action definition

As usual, the first step is to define the input in the action.yml file.

inputs:
  name:
    description: 'The name of the person to greet'
    required: true
    default: 'World'

Read the input in the action code

Then we can read the input in the action code.

const name = getInput('name');

console.log(`Hello ${name}!`);

But where does the getInput function come from? It's defined in the @actions/core package, which we need to install.

npm install @actions/core

And then add the import on top of the index.ts file.

import { getInput } from '@actions/core';

Update the workflow

Finally, we need to update the workflow to pass the input to the action.

- uses: ./
  with:
    name: 'Leonardo'

By adding the with section, we're passing the name input to the action.

Run the hello action

We can now run the action again and see the input being passed to the action.

If it doesn't work (Error: Cannot find module '@actions/core') that's ok, we'll fix it in the next section when we inlude @vercel/ncc in the workflow.