actions

As part of our ongoing efforts to keep GitHub-hosted runners updated and secure, the Windows 2016 virtual environment will be removed from GitHub Actions on March 15, 2022. We recommend you change jobs using runs-on: windows-2016 to use runs-on: windows-latest which will ensure you're always running on the latest version of Windows Server.

If you need to pin your job to a specific version of Windows Server, you can see the full list of supported versions and instructions here: supported-runners-and-hardware-resources

To raise awareness of the upcoming removal, we will temporarily fail jobs using Windows 2016 for two short 'brownout' periods. Builds that are scheduled to run during the brownout periods will fail. The brownouts are scheduled for the following dates and times:

• December 1, 2021 4:00pm UTC – 10:00pm UTC
• February 7, 2022 4:00pm UTC – 10:00pm UTC

Once deprecated, the Windows 2016 image is now excluded from the service level agreement and warranty therefore it is recommended that you move to a supported version of Windows before March 15, 2022.

You can learn more about our software and image guidelines for GitHub-hosted runners in the virtual environment repository. Please contact support if you experience any issues due to this change.

Now available in public beta, you can reuse entire workflows as if they were an action. Instead of copying and pasting workflow definitions across repositories, you can now reference an existing workflow with a single line of configuration.

Reusing workflows are great for reducing configuration. Here’s a few examples:

• Create a workflow for building your homegrown framework so your users can quickly setup CI
• Create a workflow to deploy to production, and reference it from each repository of your microservice application
• Create a workflow to roll up end-of-sprint metrics, and encourage every team to add it to their repository

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

macOS Big Sur (11) became generally available on GitHub-hosted runners in August 2021. Over the next 8 weeks, jobs using the macos-latest runner label will migrate from Catalina (10.15) to Big Sur (11). 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.

Start using GitHub Actions to build and publish apps for the Apple ecosystem by updating your jobs to include runs-on: macos-latest

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: macos-latest
     steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Build
        run: swift build
      - name: Run tests
        run: swift test

The macOS 11 Big Sur runner image has different tools and tool versions than macOS 10.15 Catalina. See the full list of changed software.

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

GitHub Actions now supports ephemeral (i.e. single job) self-hosted runners and a new workflow_job webhook to make autoscaling your runners easier. After a job is run, ephemeral runners are automatically unregistered from the service, allowing you to do any required post-job management.

Ephemeral runners are a good choice for self-managed environments where you need each job to run on a clean image. A runner is configured as ephemeral by adding the optional --ephemeral parameter during configuration. Learn more about registering ephemeral runners.

Example ephemeral runner registration:

$ ./config.sh --url https://github.com/octo-org --token example-token --ephemeral

Combine ephemeral runners with the new workflow_job webhook to automatically scale your self-hosted runners in response to your Actions job requests, including the runner labels from the runs-on: key from your workflow. Learn more about the workflow_job webhook and how to use it to autoscale your self-hosted runners.

Get started with automating the configuration of your self-hosted runners by following this automation guide in the runner repo.

GitHub Actions now has an updated management experience for your self-hosted runners that makes it easier to manage runner groups and see the status of your runners. New Runners and Runner groups pages give you flexibility to get a summary view of your runners, or deep dive into a specific runner to edit it or see what job it may be currently running. You'll find both of these experiences in the Actions settings page of your repository or organization.

Similarly, a new Runner groups page gives you a cleaner view of all the runner groups you've created, and how many runners are included in each one.

Learn more about self-hosting your runners for GitHub Actions.
Learn more about managing access to your runners with runner groups.

You can now use setup-node action to cache dependencies for projects with monorepo and pnpm package manager. Use the optional cache-dependency-path field to specify the path to dependency file(s).

steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- uses: actions/setup-node@v2
  with:
    node-version: 14
    cache: npm
    cache-dependency-path: 'sub-project/package-lock.json'

For questions, visit the setup-node repository and GitHub Actions community.

You can now filter workflow runs by the date of creation by using the created filter. For example: created:<2021-08-31.

This is also available in the API

You can now run Java projects faster on GitHub Actions by enabling dependency caching on the setup-java action. setup-java supports caching for both Gradle and Maven projects.

The following example enables caching for a Java project with Gradle:

steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- uses: actions/setup-java@v2
  with:
    distribution: 'temurin'
    java-version: '11'
    cache: 'gradle'
- run: ./gradlew build

For additional examples, visit the setup-java repository.

Previously, actions written in YAML could only use scripts. Now, they can also reference other actions. This makes it easy to reduce duplication in your workflows.

For example, the following action uses 3 actions to setup buildx, log in to Docker, and publish an image. By combining these into a single action it provides a larger unit of reuse that you can put into the job of any workflow.

name: "Publish to Docker"
description: "Pushes built artifacts to Docker"

inputs:
  registry_username:
    description: “Username for image registry”
    required: true
  registry_password:
    description: “Password for image registry”
    required: true

runs:
  using: "composite"
  steps:
      - uses: docker/setup-buildx-action@v1

      - uses: docker/login-action@v1
        with:
          username: ${{inputs.registry_username}}
          password: ${{inputs.registry_password}}

      - uses: docker/build-push-action@v2
        with:
          context: .
          push: true
          tags: user/app:latest

Developers can then reference this action in all of their repositories as a single action:

on: [push]

jobs:
  publish:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: my-org/publish-docker@v1
        with:
          registry_username: ${{secrets.REGISTRY_USERNAME}}
          registry_password: ${{secrets.REGISTRY_PASSWORD}}

Learn more about action composition.

For questions, visit the GitHub Actions community

Windows Server 2022 with Visual Studio 2022 Preview is now available in beta on GitHub-hosted runners. Use it by putting runs-on: windows-2022 in your workflow file.

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 docs.

macOS 11 Big Sur is now generally available on GitHub-hosted runners. Use GitHub Actions to build and publish apps for the latest Apple ecosystem by updating your workflows to include runs-on: macos-11

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: macos-11
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Build
        run: swift build
      - name: Run tests
        run: swift test

The macOS 11 Big Sur runner image has different tools and tool versions than macOS 10.15 Catalina. See the full list of changed software.

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

The Audit Log now includes events associated with GitHub Actions self-hosted runners. This data provides enterprise customers with an expanded data set for security and compliance audits.

New events will be incorporated into the audit log when:

• A self-hosted runner application has started and can begin processing new jobs
• A self-hosted runner application has stopped and will no longer process jobs

These new events are only available to customers on the Enterprise plan and can be viewed using the REST API.

Learn more about Audit Log events

For questions please visit the GitHub Actions community forum

You can now run Node.js projects faster on GitHub Actions by enabling dependency caching on the setup-node action. setup-node supports caching from both npm and yarn package managers.

- uses: actions/setup-node@v2
  with:
    node-version: '14'
    cache: npm

For questions, visit the GitHub Actions community