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We have introduced a new policy setting that controls whether GitHub Actions can approve pull requests. This protects against a user using Actions to satisfy the "Required approvals" branch protection requirement and merging a change that was not reviewed by another user.

To prevent breaking existing workflows Allow GitHub Actions reviews to count towards required approval is enabled by default. However, an organization admin can disable it under the organization's Actions settings.

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GitHub is updating the retention policy as it pertains to Checks data. Checks created by GitHub Actions and third-party GitHub Apps will be affected by the new retention policy.

Starting on February 14th, 2022 GitHub will begin archiving detailed checks data older than 400 days. As part of the archiving process we will create a rollup commit status representing the state of all checks for that commit. As a consequence, the merge box in any pull request with archived required checks will be in a blocked state and checks will need to be rerun in order to merge it.

Learn more about checks

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While renewing GitHub Actions SSL certificates, an unexpected change in the intermediate certificate authority broke workflows using Open ID Connect (OIDC) based deployment to AWS.

To fix the issue please follow the following steps:

  1. In the AWS Console, go to IAM -> Identity Providers
  2. Open the provider(s) for token.actions.githubusercontent.com
  3. Click Manage under Thumbprints
  4. Add the thumbprint 6938fd4d98bab03faadb97b34396831e3780aea1

We’re continuing to investigate, to ensure this issue does not reoccur in the future.

Learn more about using OIDC with GitHub Actions.

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Windows Server 2022 became generally available on GitHub-hosted runners in November 2021. Over the next 8 weeks, jobs using the windows-latest runner label will migrate from Windows Server 2019 to Windows Server 2022. During migration, you can determine if your job has migrated by viewing the Virtual Environment information in the Set up job step of your logs.

Use GitHub Actions to build your apps with the latest Visual Studio 2022 by updating your workflows to include runs-on: windows-latest

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: windows-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v1
      - name: Build
        run: dotnet build
      - name: Run tests
        run: dotnet test

The Windows Server 2022 runner image has different tools and tool versions than Windows Server 2019. See the full list of changed software.

If you spot any issues with your workflows when using Windows Server 2022, please let us know by creating an issue in the virtual-environments repository.

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Previously, when running a job that requires a self-hosted runner, GitHub Actions would look for self-hosted runners in the repository, organization, and enterprise, in that order.

We are changing that behavior so that the first available matching runner at any level will run the job in all cases. This allows jobs to be sent to self-hosted runners much faster, especially for organizations and enterprises with lots of self-hosted runners.

Learn more in the documentation

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Getting started with GitHub Actions just got easier! Now, when you want to create an Actions workflow in the Actions tab of your repository, the workflow recommendations will be based on repository analysis that detects elements, such as programming language, build tools, frameworks, and package managers.

For example, if a repository contains a Node.js application that has been containerized, then the repository analysis will prioritize showing you container and Node related workflows.

We have also extended recommendations to the deployment category.
and added search and filters to help you find the right workflow that matches your unique requirements.

Learn more about this GitHub Actions improvement.

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In the latest update to our GitHub-hosted runners virtual environments, Node.js 16 has become the default version of node and npm 8 has become the default version of npm.

To select the version of Node.js that you use for your projects, we encourage you to use the setup-node action.

For questions, visit the GitHub Actions community

To see what's next for Actions, visit our public roadmap

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Starting 12-09-2021, GitHub Actions workflows triggered by Dependabot for the create, deployment, and deployment_status events will always receive a read-only token and no secrets.

Starting 12-09-2021, GitHub Actions workflows triggered by Dependabot for the pull_request_target event on pull requests where the base ref was created by Dependabot will always receive a read-only token and no secrets.

Both changes are designed to prevent potentially malicious code from executing in a privileged workflow.

Learn more about using Actions and Dependabot together

For questions, visit the GitHub Actions community

To see what's next for Actions, visit our public roadmap

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GitHub Actions workflows triggered by Dependabot will now be sent the Dependabot secrets.

This change will enable you to pull from private package registries in your CI using the same secrets you have configured for Dependabot to use and will improve how Actions and Dependabot work together.

Learn more about using Actions and Dependabot together

For questions, visit the GitHub Actions community

To see what's next for Actions, visit our public roadmap

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Reusable workflows are now generally available. Reusable workflows help you reduce duplication by enabling you to reuse an entire workflow as if it were an action. A number of improvements have been made since the beta was released in October:

  • You can utilize outputs to pass data from reusable workflows to other jobs in the caller workflow
  • You can pass environment secrets to reusable workflows
  • The audit log includes information about which reusable workflows are used

Learn more about reusing workflows.
For questions, visit the GitHub Actions community.
To see what's next for Actions, visit our public roadmap.

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You can now run workflows for Python projects faster on GitHub Actions by enabling dependency caching on the setup-python action. setup-python supports caching for both pip and pipenv projects.

The following example enables caching for a Python project with pip:

steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- uses: actions/setup-python@v2
  with:
    python-version: '3.9'
    cache: 'pip'
- run: pip install -r requirements.txt
- run: pip test

For additional examples, visit the setup-python repository.

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You can now enjoy a higher per-repository cache size. The cache storage for each repository has doubled to 10GB. This enables Actions users on github.com to run workflows faster by caching even bigger dependencies and other commonly reused files from previous jobs. There is no limit on the number of caches you can store, but the total size of all caches in a repository is now be limited to 10 GB.

Learn more about Caching dependencies to speed up workflows. For questions, visit the GitHub Actions community. To see what’s next for Actions, visit our public roadmap.

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Windows Server 2022 with Visual Studio 2022 is now generally available on GitHub-hosted runners. To use it now, simply add runs-on: windows-2022 in your workflow file. Otherwise, our recommendation is to use windows-latest, which currently utilizes Windows 2019 but will begin running on Windows 2022 in the near future. This will ensure your workflows are always using a recent OS and removes the need to constantly update workflow files with image versions.

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: windows-2022
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v1
      - name: Build
        run: dotnet build
      - name: Run tests
        run: dotnet test

The Windows Server 2022 runner image has different tools and tool versions than Windows Server 2019.

Read more on available runner images and beta images terms of use in our documentation.

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