action-status

action-status makes it easy to create check statuses in GitHub Actions.

Why?

Currently, each action in a GitHub Actions workflow has its status set automatically, and you can't change anything useful about the status (such as its short textual description or "Details" link URL) because it'll be overwritten when the action is resolved in the workflow. action-status makes it easy to create separate status checks with a unique name that can include more useful information, for instance:

• A short description noting why the action succeeded or failed;
• Intentionally "pending" statuses that indicate things to be fixed in a pull request before it can be merged, a la Semantic Pull Requests;
• Point directly to relevant URLs from the "Details" link, such as site deployments;
• Report code coverage with ASCII characters;
• And so on!

Usage

There are three different ways to use it:

1. As an npm dependency
2. With npx
3. As a GitHub Action

npm

You can install action-status via npm with:

npm install --save --dev action-status

Then, in your package's run-scripts you can call it via action-status, e.g. if you publish to npm from Actions, you could do this:

{
  "scripts": {
    "prepublish": "action-status --context=\"publish $npm_package_name\" --state=pending --desc=\"Publishing $npm_package_version...\"",
    "postpublish": "action-status --context=\"publish $npm_package_name\" --state=success --desc=\"Published $npm_package_version\"",
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "action-status": "1.0.0"
  }
}

⚠️ Warning: npm is run as root in GitHub Actions, which means that pre- and post- lifecycle scripts will not be run unless you explicitly call npm with the --unsafe-perms option. Be warned, though, that this makes it possible for any of your dependencies to run (in a preinstall script, for instance) arbitrary commands with access to your secrets, source, and git history.

npx

Using npm's npx command allows you to run action-status without explicitly declaring it as a dependency in your package.json:

npx action-status --context=ping --state=success

Note: This is really only useful if you're running it once, though, since npx will reinstall the package each time you call it.

GitHub Action

You can call the action-status command via an action with:

action "status" {
  uses = "shawnbot/action-status@master"
  args = ["--context=ping", "--state=success"]
  secrets = ["GITHUB_TOKEN"]
}

Note: You must enable the automatic GITHUB_TOKEN secret unless you're going to provide a different access token via --token=$SOME_OTHER_SECRET