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Introducing Actions on the Repository view on GitHub Mobile

Actions on GitHub Mobile

Actions are coming to your Repositories on GitHub Mobile! Find all your repository's workflows in one convenient place.

Tapping on the new "Actions" row on a Repository now shows you a list of all of the Repository's workflows. Choosing a workflow will show you all of its runs, allowing you to check up on things while on the go. If you want to dig into the details, tapping on a run will lead you into the familiar workflow experience we brought you last year to explore everything from a run's overall status to its individual jobs and even logs.

A run didn't go as planned? No problem. Toggle the new debug-switch when re-running a workflow to see what's going on under the hood, just like you would on GitHub.com.

Read more about GitHub Mobile and share your feedback to help us improve.

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GitHub Actions: All Actions will run on Node16 instead of Node12

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)

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GitHub Actions: Faster macOS runners are now available in open public beta!

XL macOS runners can now be used by any developer, without the need to sign-up! You can try the new runners today by setting the runs-on: key to macos-latest-xl, macos-12-xl, or macos-13-xl in your workflow file. The runners are available today to all customers!

More information about using the runner can be found here.
To learn more about runner per job minute pricing, check out the docs.

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GitHub Actions: macOS 13 is now available

The macOS 13 (Ventura) beta runner image is now available for GitHub-hosted macOS runners. You can try it today by setting the runs-on: key to macos-13 or macos-13-xl in your workflow file. The full list of software available for macOS 13 can be found here. If you see any issues with your workflows when using macOS 13, please create an issue in the runner-images repository.

More information about the runner can be found in our docs. To learn more about pricing, click here.

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GitHub Actions: Create and share your own deployment protection rules for safe and controlled deployments

GitHub today announced public beta support for custom deployment protection rules for safely rolling out deployments using GitHub Actions.

Custom deployment protection rules are powered by GitHub Apps and can be enabled on any GitHub org/repo/environment to allow external systems to approve or reject deployments.
Each rule evaluates specific conditions in those external systems to assess the readiness of the environments for automated deployments, making them less risky and more robust.

Starting with this public beta, GitHub Enterprise Cloud (GHEC) users can create their own protection rules to control deployment workflows and, if desired, share them by publishing their apps to the GitHub Marketplace.
You could also install official apps for deployment protection rules from various external partners to define security, compliance and governance related conditions in their services that can be used to control deployments with Actions workflows.

Two custom deployment protection rules enabled on a production environment

Learn more about creating and configuring custom deployment protection rules to set up rigorous, streamlined guardrails for your deployments that ensure only the deployments that have passed all quality, security, and manual approval requirements make it to production.

For questions, visit the GitHub Actions community.
To see what's next for Actions, visit our public roadmap.

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Manage caches in your Actions workflows from Web Interface

Caching dependencies and other commonly reused files enables developers to speed up their GitHub Actions workflows and make them more efficient.
We have now enabled Cache Management from the web interface to enable developers to get more transparency and control over their cache usage within their GitHub repositories.

Actions users who use actions/cache can now:

  • View a list of all cache entries for a repository.
  • Filter and sort the list of caches using specific metadata such as cache size, creation time, or last accessed time.
  • Delete a corrupt or a stale cache entry
  • Monitor aggregate cache usage for repositories and organizations.

In addition to the Cache Management UX that we have now enabled, you could also use our Cache APIs or install the GitHub CLI extension for Actions cache to manage your caches from your terminal.

Learn more about dependency caching to speed up your Actions workflows.
For questions or to share your feedback, visit the GitHub Actions community.

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GitHub Actions: Visual Studio Code Extension is now in public beta

The GitHub Actions extension for VS Code is now in public beta. This extension includes rich editing features, such as syntax validation and autocomplete, making workflow authoring and editing faster and easier. Developers will also be able to view workflow runs, inspect logs, and trigger re-runs directly from VS Code.

To get started, visit the VS Code Marketplace or learn more about the extension's capabilities from the Actions VS Code Extension blog post.

See what's next for Actions by visiting our public roadmap.

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GitHub Actions: The setup-go Action now enables caching by default

Enabling caching by default has demonstrated improved workflow performance, and can reduce build times by 20-40% for repositories with dependencies greater than 100 MB! This change has been made to the latest setup-go Action(V4). Developers no longer have to specify the cache: true parameter in their YAML file to obtain the benefits of caching. For more information on building, testing, and caching dependencies with Go, check out the docs here!

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GitHub Actions: SBOMs are now attached to hosted runner image releases for macOS

In addition to Ubuntu & Windows, GitHub Actions now attaches a SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) to hosted runner image releases for macOS. In the context of GitHub Actions hosted runners, an SBOM details the software pre-installed on the virtual machine that is running your Actions workflows. This is useful in the situation where there is a vulnerability detected, you will be able to quickly tell if you are affected or not. If you are building artifacts, you can include this SBOM in your bill of materials for a comprehensive list of everything that went into creating your software.

To check out the new files, head over to the runner-images repository release page now or check out our docs for more information.

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GitHub Actions Importer General Availability

GitHub Actions Importer is now generally available to all GitHub users. You can now easily plan, forecast, and automate migrations from Azure DevOps, CircleCI, GitLab, Jenkins, and Travis CI to GitHub Actions. GitHub Actions Importer is a free extension of the official GitHub CLI and provides you with the confidence to migrate your CI/CD pipelines to continue delivering software efficiently.

gh-actions-importer

For details on how to get started, please check out our documentation. For questions and feedback, visit the GitHub Actions Importer community.

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GitHub Actions: Introducing the new, more powerful GitHub-hosted x64 macOS runners

People on the paid Team and Enterprise plans can now sign up for a beta to get access to new and powerful macOS runners for x64. Access is requested via the beta sign-up page. Once your request has been approved, an email will be sent with additional details. The new XL runner option provides developers with 12 cores to execute their Actions workflows on and improve build times.

To learn more visit the docs. Information on pricing for the new macOS XL runner is here.

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GitHub Actions: Job summary updates

We are making changes to job summaries and logs in GitHub Actions that will impact customers using self-hosted runners. Over the next six months, customers using self-hosted runners will need to ensure machines have appropriate network access to communicate with the GitHub hosts below so that job summaries and logs emitted from Actions workflows can work as expected.

  • results-receiver.actions.githubusercontent.com
  • productionresultssa*.blob.core.windows.net

After July 31, 2023, if you are using self-hosted runners and have not updated your network access settings to allow the aforementioned hosts, your job summaries and logs may not display correctly.

For more details see
Communication between self-hosted runners and GitHub.

For questions, visit the GitHub Actions community.

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

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GitHub Actions: OpenID Connect token now supports more claims for configuring granular cloud access

OpenID Connect (OIDC) support in GitHub Actions enables secure cloud deployments using short-lived tokens that are automatically rotated for each deployment.
Each OIDC token includes standard claims like the audience, issuer, subject and many more custom claims that uniquely define the workflow job that generated the token. These claims can be used to define fine grained trust policies to control the access to specific cloud roles and resources.

  • We now support more custom claims within the token : actor_id, repository_id, repository_owner_id
    workflow_ref, workflow_sha and job_workflow_sha – to help uniquely verify the source of a workflow job, even if the job references a reusable workflow.
  • We are also adding these new attributes as default environment variables and also to github context

These changes enable developers to define more advanced access policies using OpenID connect and do more secure cloud deployments at scale with GitHub Actions.

Learn more about Security hardening your GitHub Workflows using OpenID Connect.

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GitHub Actions: SBOMs now attached to hosted runner image releases for Ubuntu & Windows

GitHub Actions hosted runner images are now more secure than ever, with the ability to see exactly what software is pre-installed on the image that was used by the runner during your build. GitHub now attaches a software bill of materials (SBOM) as an asset to each image release for Ubuntu and Windows. Support for Mac runners is targeted for Q1 2023.

In the context of GitHub Actions hosted runners, an SBOM details the software pre-installed on the virtual machine that is running your Actions workflows. This is useful in the situation where there is a vulnerability detected, you will be able to quickly tell if you are affected or not. If you are building artifacts, you can include this SBOM in your bill of materials for a comprehensive list of everything that went into creating your software.

To check out the new files, head over to the runner-images repository release page now or check out our docs for more information.

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GitHub Actions – Sharing actions and reusable workflows from private repositories is now GA

The actions and reusable workflows from private repositories can now be shared with other private repositories within the same organization, user account, or enterprise.
See managing the repository settings and managing the enterprise repository settings to allow access to workflows in other repositories.

We have also added the API support to configure Actions share policy. Refer to API support or API support for Enterprise for more details.

Learn more about Sharing actions and workflows from your private repository, Sharing actions and workflows with your organization, and Sharing Actions and workflows with your enterprise.

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Extending Checks Retention Policies to GHES

Previously, data generated from Checks were not managed by a retention policy and would therefore grow unbounded. A recent change was made to GitHub.com that archives checks data after 400 days and deletes records 30 days after they are archived.

This change will be extended to GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) version 3.8 with additional features that will allow administrators to:

  • Enable/disable checks retention
  • Set a custom retention threshold
  • Set a custom hard-delete threshold

This pertains to all Checks data, including those that are generated from GitHub Actions and the Statuses API.

For questions, visit the GitHub community or get started with Checks API today.

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