Writing a GitHub Action that pushes commits
Goal
So, you are hoping:
automatically reformat code pushed to PR?
automatically merge one branch into another at a certain cadence?
something else involving automatically creating and pushing git commits?
All of these can be solved using a GitHub Action workflow!
There are different ways to set up your workflow, with varying levels of control over the result. This article describes the most dead-simple way I could come up with.
My solution
First, make sure GitHub Actions are enabled for your repository. Make sure that GitHub Actions has write access to your repository – this can be done in repo settings.
Now, add a workflow named <your-workflow-name>.yml to ./.github/workflows/, following this template:
name: Name of your workflow
on:
push:
branches: [ ... ] # Replace ... with the branches you want to trigger upon.
jobs:
job-name: # set your job name to something nice.
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
with:
fetch-depth: 0 # all branches and tags
- name: Set git identity
run: |
git config user.name 'github-actions[bot]'
git config user.email 'github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com'
# ...
# ADD YOUR GIT OPERATION STEPS HERE
# ...
- name: Push
run: |
git remote set-url origin https://x-access-token:${{ github.token }}@github.com/${{ github.repository }}
git push
Example: https://github.com/openedx/tutor-contrib-coursegraph/blob/master/.github/workflows/merge-to-nightly.yml
Discussion
Pros
This approach is very simple to set up.
Using
github-actions[bot]gives you the GitHub logo as the profile picture on the commit.github-actions[bot]isn’t a real GitHub user account, which will hopefully make it clear that a user account isn’t responsible for commits that the action makes.
Cons:
For the branches being pushed to, you cannot have protections that require a PR or any status checks. This is probably a showstopper if you’re hoping to push to
masteror any other critical branch.
Improvements
If you want to push to a branch without making the branch unprotected, you may want to ditch the github.token strategy for in favor of authenticating as a GitHub App. This would allow you to protect the target branch, while marking the GitHub App as an explicit exception to the branch protection.