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
In this tutorial we're going to see in detail how to: The articles will be split into separate bite-sized chapters as technically each one can be a little tutorial by itself. If you're interested in the full text all at once, you can find it here: https://leonardomontini.dev/typescript-github-action/ One more great piece of advice is to create a new repository and follow along with the steps. This way you'll have a working action at the end of the post and you'll be able to play with it and experiment, rather than just reading a long tutorial and forgetting about 90% of it. The full code of this tutorial is available on GitHub on this repo, so you can always refer to it if you get stuck.Read more...
The full tutorial (all chapters at once) is also available as a video, which you can find here:
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.
Closing
And that was it for today! if you have any question or suggestion, feel free to add a comment :)
See you in the next chapter!
Thanks for reading this article, I hope you found it interesting!
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Top comments (1)
Thanks for this!