actions

We will be moving the private beta of required workflows on GitHub Actions to Repository Rules to give organization administrators a powerful way to protect their repositories with added feature benefits including unified configuration, dry running workflow rules, branch targeting, and a consistent UI experience.

Starting September 20th, 2023, users can configure their workflows using rulesets in order to run and pass in selected repositories before merging their code. On October 18th, users will no longer be able to access Actions Required Workflows and must use rulesets in its place.

How does this impact beta users of Actions Required Workflows?

Existing Actions Required Workflows private beta users will continue to have access until October 18th, 2023, allowing them time to adapt to the forthcoming changes. During this transitional period, users will maintain their existing workflows without disruption. This ensures that organizations can smoothly navigate the migration process, avoiding any abrupt disruptions to their current code merging practices. Here’s a quick overview of the events leading up to the move.

For GHEC customers

Leading up to October 18th:

• GitHub will attempt to automatically migrate any existing Required Workflows to Rulesets for customers.
• Any workflow files that did not successfully migrate will need to be manually migrated by code owners.

After October 18th:

• The ability to require a workflow to pass before merging code will only be available on GitHub Enterprise plans via Repository Rules
• Organization Rulesets will enable administrators to define, configure, and manage all workflows required to pass before merging code in repositories.
• The feature formally known as Actions Required Workflows will no longer be accessible and users will be directed to Rulesets.

For GHES customers by version

• GHES 3.8 and 3.9 will not be impacted until their next upgrade
• GHES 3.10 and 3.11 will not be impacted if Actions Required Workflows are already in use
• GHES 3.12 Requiring a workflow to run and pass before merging will be only be available vis Repository Rulesets

To learn more about how Repository Rules can help control how people can interact with branches, visit our documentation.

On October 11, 2022, we annouced plans to deprecate the save-state and set-output workflow commands on May 31, 2023. We have since decided to postpone the removal given the amount of usage we are still seeing with these commands.

Workflows using save-state or set-output in their workflows will continue to work as expected, however, a warning will appear under annotations indicating the planned deprecation. We recommend customers using these commands to upgrade their workflows to use environment files.

For more information on environment files, please check out our documentation. To see what's next for Actions, visit our public roadmap.

Node12 has been out of support since April 2022. As a result we started the deprecation process of Node12 for GitHub Actions by migrating all actions to run on Node16 on June 14th.
We have seen no major issues reported and a minimal number of people opted out of the forced upgrade to Node16. Given this, we will remove Node12 from the Actions runner on the 14th of August 2023.

What you need to do

For Actions maintainers: Update your actions to run on Node16 instead of Node12 (Actions configuration settings)
For Actions users: Update your workflows with latest versions of the actions which runs on Node16 (Using versions for Actions)

Auto-scaling self-hosted runners using the Actions runner controller and runner scale sets is now in generally avaliable.

Learn more about scalling self hosted runners and share your feedback with us in the Community Discussion!

Node12 has been out of support since April 2022. As a result we have started the deprecation process of Node12 for GitHub Actions. We plan to migrate all actions to run on Node16 by Summer 2023.
Following on from our warning in workflows using Node12 we will start enforcing the use of Node16 rather than Node12 on the 14th of June.

To opt out of this and continue using Node12 while it is still available in the runner, you can choose to set ACTIONS_ALLOW_USE_UNSECURE_NODE_VERSION=true
as an 'env' in their workflow or as an environment variable on your runner machine. This will only work until we upgrade the runner removing Node12 later in the summer.

What you need to do

For Actions maintainers: Update your actions to run on Node16 instead of Node12 (Actions configuration settings)
For Actions users: Update your workflows with latest versions of the actions which runs on Node16 (Using versions for Actions)

You can now create single-use self-hosted runners without time-limited registration tokens using the REST API.

When a runner registers using this API it will only be allowed to run a single job before being automatically removed from the repository, organization, or enterprise. This enables you to improve the security of your self-hosted runner infrastructure by limiting the exposure of long lived credentials.

Learn more about just-in-time runners

Auto scaling self hosted runners using the actions runner controller and runner scale sets is now in public beta.

Learn more about scaling self hosted runners

Node 12 has been out of support since April 2022, as a result we have started the deprecation process of Node 12 for GitHub Actions. We plan to migrate all actions to run on Node16 by Summer 2023.
Following on from our warning in workflows using Node 12, we will start enforcing the use of Node16 rather than Node12 on the 14th of June.

What you need to do
For Actions maintainers: Update your actions to run on Node 16 instead of Node 12 (Actions configuration settings)
For Actions users: Update your workflows with latest versions of the actions which runs on Node 16 (Using versions for Actions)