Streamline your workflow with GitHub Actions from open source maintainers

Since we introduced GitHub Actions in beta last year, developers have created thousands of shareable workflows. Actions are just code in a repository, so anyone can create, reuse, and fork their software development practices. Need a little inspiration for your own workflow? We’ve got a few examples to share with you.

Twitter, together! (gr2m)

Gregor Martynus is the maintainer for a few projects, including octokit, nock, and semantic-release. Gregor created twitter-together, a GitHub Action for open source and event maintainers who share a project Twitter account. Twitter-together uses text files to publish tweets from a GitHub repository rather than tweeting directly. Using GitHub’s pull request review process encourages more collaboration, Twitter activity, and editorial contributions by inviting everyone to submit tweet drafts to a project.

publish-to-github-action (mikeal)

Mikeal Rogers is a maintainer on IPFS and an important part of the NodeJS community. Mikeal wrote a GitHub Action that commits and pushes any uncommitted files back into their repository. This Action is intentionally simple—and easy to use in your own repositories. Mikeal’s use cases include building a JS bundle to update badges in a project’s README and publishing metrics collected on a daily and weekly basis along with generated markdown files from the new data.

WordPress Plugin Deploy (helen)

Helen Hou-Sandi is the lead developer at WordPress and Director of Open Source Initiatives at 10up. Helen’s Action publishes your WordPress plugin to the plugin repository when you tag a new release. This means you no longer have to remember how to use SVN. You’ll also find a complementary Action to update assets between releases, like bumping versions or updating screenshots.

Debugging with tmate (mxschmitt)

Max Schmitt is the maintainer of react-bootstrap. After some initial brainstorming, Max saw an opportunity to improve debugging capabilities for GitHub Actions through the use of tmate and SSH. Max’s GitHub Action, Debugging with tmate, offers a direct way to interact with the host system on which the actual scripts (GitHub Actions) will run.

Try it out

These are just a few Actions ready for your workflows. For more, check out our curated list of community created GitHub Actions. Try out the beta before Actions becomes generally available on November 13—we can’t wait to see what you create.

Sign up for the GitHub Actions beta

Written by

Brian Douglas

@bdougie