You can now get more transparency and control over dependency caching in your actions workflows.
Actions users who use actions/cache to make jobs faster on GitHub Actions can now use our cache list and delete APIs to:
Learn more about Managing caching dependencies to speed up workflows.
The macOS 12 Actions runner image is now generally available. Start using GitHub Actions to build and publish apps for the Apple ecosystem with the latest version of Xcode by updating your jobs to include runs-on: macos-12
jobs:
build:
runs-on: macos-12
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- name: Build
run: swift build
- name: Run tests
run: swift testThe macOS 12 Actions runner image has different tools and tool versions than macOS 11. See the full list of changed software.
If you spot any issues with your workflows when using the image, please let us know by creating an issue in the virtual-environments repository.
Workflows triggered by workflow_dispatch and workflow_call can now access their inputs using the inputs context.
Previously workflow_dispatch inputs were in the event payload. This made it difficult for workflow authors who wanted to have one workflow that was both reusable and manually triggered. Now a workflow author can write a single workflow triggered by workflow_dispatch and workflow_call and use the inputs context to access the input values.
For workflows triggered by workflow_dispatch inputs are still available in the github.event.inputs context to maintain compatibility.
Using the inputs context in GitHub Actions
You can now enable debug logging when you re-run jobs in a GitHub Actions workflow run. This gives you additional information about the job's execution and its environment which can help you diagnose failures.
To enable debug logging, select "Enable debug logging" in the re-run dialog.
You can also enable debug logging using the API or the command-line client.
For more details see
Re-running workflows and jobs.
For questions, visit the GitHub Actions community.
To see what's next for Actions, visit our public roadmap.
Actions authors can now specify that their action can run in Node.js 16 by specifying runs.using as node16 in the action's action.yml. This is in addition to the existing Node.js 12 support; actions can continue to specify runs.using: node12 to use the Node.js 12 runtime.
Runners supporting Node.js 16 actions are available on all GitHub-hosted runners and in GitHub Enterprise Server 3.4 and newer. GitHub Enterprise Server 3.3 and newer can manually install a newer runner to add support for Node.js 16 based actions.
As a result, actions authors who move from targeting Node.js 12 to Node.js 16 should release with a new major version number to communicate that there is a possible breaking change for GitHub Enterprise Server 3.3 and earlier.
A beta of the Ubuntu 22.04 runner image for GitHub Actions is now available. Start using GitHub Actions to build software on the latest version of Ubuntu by updating your jobs to include runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
jobs:
build:
runs-on: ubuntu-22.04
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v3
- uses: actions/setup-node@v3
with:
node-version: '14'
- run: npm install -g bats
- run: bats -vThe Ubuntu 22.04 Actions runner image has different tools and tool versions than ubuntu 20.04. See the difference between the two OS versions here. Click here for the full list of software available on Ubuntu 22.04.
If you spot any issues with your workflows when using the image, please let us know by creating an issue in the virtual-environments repository.
While the runner image is in beta, you may experience longer queue times during peak usage hours.
GitHub Actions now lets you generate markdown files and publish them as a job summary.
We have heard a lot of feedback from users asking for the ability to output something beyond simple text. For example, after running a bunch of tests it would be great to see how many passed, failed, or were skipped at a glance rather than digging through hundreds of lines of log output. Now, using the same familiar functionality that powers pull requests and issues, an action can generate custom Markdown content on the run summary generated by each job.
A couple of GitHub Stars with early access have already incorporated this feature into their test loggers for dotnet test and Jest.
To learn more checkout the blog post from the GitHub Actions engineering team
To further reduce the risk of a user using Actions to merge a change into a protected branch that was not reviewed by another person, the organization setting to disallow Actions from approving pull requests, which was introduced in January 2022, has been extended to also limit Actions from creating pull requests.
The Allow GitHub Actions to create and approve pull requests setting can be managed by admins in organization settings under Actions > General > Workflow permissions.
GitHub Actions simplifies using secrets with reusable workflows with the secrets: inherit keyword.
Previously when passing secrets to a reusable workflow, you had to pass each secret as a separate argument. Now you can simply pass the secrets: inherit to the reusable workflow and the secrets will be inherited from the calling workflow.
The macOS 12 Actions runner image public beta is now available. Start using GitHub Actions to build and publish apps for the Apple ecosystem with the latest version of Xcode (13.3) by updating your jobs to include runs-on: macos-12
jobs:
build:
runs-on: macos-12
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- name: Build
run: swift build
- name: Run tests
run: swift testThe macOS 12 Actions runner image has different tools and tool versions than macOS 11. See the full list of changed software.
If you spot any issues with your workflows when using the image, please let us know by creating an issue in the virtual-environments repository.
While the runner image is in beta, you may experience longer queue times during peak usage hours. Follow the public roadmap for information on general availability of this image.
If you manage self-hosted runners for GitHub Actions, you can now specify shell scripts that run before the runner starts running a job from a workflow, and after a job completes.
This allows you to perform a task on your self-hosted runner before a job starts and after a job ends, so you can set up your execution environment and clean up after workflow runs to ensure a consistent state on the runner itself, without requiring users to add that to their workflows.
Learn more about running scripts before or after a job
You can now restrict self-hosted runner groups to only be accessible from certain workflows.
In addition to restricting which repositories can access specific enterprise and organization runner groups, administrators can further control access by selecting specific workflow files and versions. Combining this feature with reusable workflow can help you create more secure standard workflows in your organization.
Learn more about restricting access to self-hosted runners
You can now re-run only failed jobs or an individual job in a GitHub Actions workflow run.
For more details see Save time with partial re-runs in GitHub Actions on the GitHub blog.
Dependency caching is one of the most effective ways to make jobs faster on GitHub Actions. You can now monitor the storage usage of your existing caches and get greater control over cache availability for your action workflows.
Actions users who use actions/cache to speed up their workflow execution times can now use our cache usage APIs to:
Learn more about Managing caching dependencies to speed up workflows.
Support for Actions in internal repositories is now generally available for GitHub organizations owned by an enterprise account.
You can innersource automation by sharing Actions in internal repositories, without publishing them publicly.
And then manage the repository settings or use our API support to allow access to workflows in other repositories:
Learn more about Sharing Actions and workflows with your enterprise.