GitHub Action that introduces support for global workflows. Global workflows are the ones that you update in just one repo, and then they are automatically updated in other repositories in your organization or user account.

Action is released under v0.2.0, and I plan to extend it forward, add tests and release under v1 once I get other people using it. Feel free to create an issue about it.

• Why I Created This Action?
• Supported Event Triggers
• Action Flow
• Configuration
• Examples
  • Minimum Workflow
  • Advanced Workflow
• Development
• Known Limitations/Hardcodes
• Debug

It seems like GitHub is not going to support global workflows anytime soon. I decided to create this action as I was just super tired of manually editing the same workflow files in over 30 repositories. To be honest, I never did it; I never did it manually and could not imagine I do it 😃

Maybe GitHub will support global workflows someday. Take it into account and put global workflows in a repository called .github because once GitHub starts supporting global workflows, they will surely have to be located there. Read more about .github repository here.

This action can be triggered by:

• push event and only files that were changed in the commit are replicated to other repositories.

• workflow_dispatch event and then all files from workflow directory (except of ignored ones) are replicated to other repositories. Use case for this event is when you create new repositories in your organization that need to get global workflows. Then you can manually trigger the action and all global workflows will be updated in all repositories. Below screen shots shows how manual triggering works.

  

  This action also allows you to specify a single repository that action should run against. You can add the following input trigger in your workflow:

    workflow_dispatch:
      inputs:
        repo_name:
          description: |
            You can specify name of the repository where workflows should be pushed manually. As long as repository is not ignored by workflow settings.
            If you do not specify exact repository name, the workflow will try to replicate all missing changes to all repositories.
          required: false

  As a result you will be able to run your workflow manually by providing specific repository name. If name is not provided, action will fallback to run against all repositores. If wrong repo name is provided under repo_name, the action will fail.

  

name: Global workflow to rule them all

on:
  push:
    branches: [ master ] #or main
  workflow_dispatch: {} #to enable manual triggering of the action

jobs:

  replicate_changes:

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: derberg/[email protected]
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.CUSTOM_TOKEN }}
          files_to_ignore: name_of_file_where_this_action_is_used.yml

1. In your .github repo you could have the following workflow:

   name: Global workflow to rule them all
   
   on:
     push:
         branches: [ master ] #or main
   
   jobs:
   
     replicate_changes:
   
         runs-on: ubuntu-latest
   
         steps:
           - name: Checkout repository
             uses: actions/checkout@v2
           - name: Replicating global workflow
             uses: derberg/[email protected]
             with:
               github_token: ${{ secrets.CUSTOM_TOKEN }}
               files_to_ignore: name_of_file_where_this_action_is_used.yml
               repos_to_ignore: repo1,repo2
               topics_to_include: topic1,topic2
               exclude_private: true
               exclude_forked: true
               branches: .*-release,main
               committer_username: santiago-bernabeu
               committer_email: [email protected]
               commit_message: "ci: update global workflows"

2. In repositories that will be updated by this workflow, you can have the following auto-merge workflow file:

   name: Automerge release bump PR
   
   on:
     pull_request:
         types:
         - labeled
         - unlabeled
         - synchronize
         - opened
         - edited
         - ready_for_review
         - reopened
         - unlocked
     pull_request_review:
         types:
         - submitted
     check_suite: 
         types:
         - completed
     status: {}
   
   jobs:
   
     automerge:
         runs-on: ubuntu-latest
         steps:
         - name: Automerging
           uses: pascalgn/[email protected]
           #the actor that created pr
           if: github.actor == 'github-username-that-owns-token-used-in-global-workflow'
           env:
             GITHUB_TOKEN: "${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}"
             GITHUB_LOGIN: santiago-bernabeu
             MERGE_LABELS: ""
             MERGE_METHOD: "squash"
             MERGE_COMMIT_MESSAGE: "pull-request-title"
             MERGE_RETRIES: "10"
             MERGE_RETRY_SLEEP: "10000"

# GITHUB_TOKEN provide personal GitHub token with scope to push to repos
# GITHUB_REPOSITORY provide name of org/user and the repo in which this workflow is suppose to run
# GITHUB_EVENT_PATH is a path to local file with dummy event payload for testing
# GITHUB_EVENT_NAME is the name of the event that triggers the event
GITHUB_TOKEN=token GITHUB_EVENT_NAME=push GITHUB_EVENT_PATH="../test/fake-event.json" GITHUB_REPOSITORY="lukasz-lab/.github" npm start

• Action looks for file changes only in .github/workflows because it intends to support only global workflows and not any files. This is, of course something that can be changed. Please create an issue to discuss this change further.
• Action assumes that when triggered by push event, it has information only about one commit. It is very common for many projects and organizations to merge only of single commit or merging and squashing commits into one. If you see a need to support multiple commits on a push event, please open an issue and describe your use case and expected behavior.
• Action requires you to provide files_to_ignore as you need to remember to put there the name of the workflow file where you use this action. Yes, you need to manually provide the file's name as I did not find a nice way how, in the workflow, I can access information about the name of the workflow file. The only idea I have, which is not the best and requires some additional effort, is to read GITHUB_WORKFLOW variable and then read the workflow files' contents to match the name. I hope you have something better.

In case something ain't right, the action doesn't work as expected, enable debugging. Add to Secrets of the repository a secret called ACTIONS_STEP_DEBUG with value true. Now, once you run the action again, there will be additional logs visible that start with DEBUG: .