Generate your own GitHub Action with the actions-toolkit CLI

The GitHub Actions team provides an SDK to build your own GitHub Actions rather quickly. This GitHub Actions ToolKit is a combination of packages to make creating actions easier. Today I will show you how to make a GitHub Action with a wrapper for that Toolkit.

You can find my action at bdougie/gipht-action

If you are like me, you build a lot of similar projects repeatedly, which is why I am going to focus on the CLI version of the Toolkit for building GitHub Actions in Node.js.

$ npm install actions-toolkit

const { Toolkit } = require('actions-toolkit')
const tools = new Toolkit()

$ npx actions-toolkit my-cool-action

├── Dockerfile
├── action.yml
├── index.js
├── index.test.js
└── package.json

This Toolkit is an opinionated alternative to (and a wrapper around) the official Toolkit. actions/toolkit makes many features optional in the interest of performance, so you may prefer to use it instead of this library.

To get started, you only need the npx command

npx actions-toolkit my-cool-action

This will generate a Dockerfile, index.js, index.test.js, and action.yml.

The JavaScript contains a wrapper for the Toolkit ready for you to start your action. I chose to leverage the Giphy API to respond to issue comments and return a gif based on the provided keyword.

const { Toolkit } = require('actions-toolkit')

const fetchGif = require('./utils/giphy.js')
const giphyAPIKey = process.env.GIPHY_TOKEN

// Run your GitHub Action!
Toolkit.run(async tools => {
  // return if you ain't suppose be here
  if (tools.context.payload.comment.body.includes('.gipht')) {

    const searchTerm = tools.context.payload.comment.body.split(".gipht").join(" ")

    const url = `http://api.giphy.com/v1/gifs/translate?api_key=${giphyAPIKey}&s=${searchTerm}`
    const gifURL = await fetchGif(url)

    console.log(tools.context.issue)
    const params = {...tools.context.issue, body: `![](${gifURL})` }

    return tools.github.issues.createComment(params)

  }
}, {event: 'issue_comment.created' })

note: the GIPHY_TOKEN will need to be provided in the production workflow.

The Dockerfile is generated today, but keep in mind; you can build and GitHub Actions without one. I will cover that in a future article.

The action.yml file, if needed to publish your action on the GitHub Marketplace. I cover that in detail in the following video.

Once you have your newly generated GitHub Action in a GitHub repo, you can add it to your workflow.

name: "Comment run"
on:
  issue_comment:
    types: [created]

jobs:
  comment-run:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: bdougie/gipht-action@main
        env:
          GIPHY_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GIPHY_TOKEN }}
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.BDOUGIE_TOKEN }}

Due to GITHUB_TOKEN limitations: You will need to generate your token (i.e. BDOUGIE_TOKEN). See this article for details on why and how to do that.

This is part of my 28 days of Actions series. To get notified of more GitHub Action tips, follow the GitHub organization right here on Dev.

02:05

Automate your PR reviews with GitHub Action scripting in JavaScript

Brian Douglas for GitHub ・ Feb 14 '21

#github #devops #githubactions #javascript