You can use this GitHub Action to commit changes made in your workflow run directly to your repo: for example, you use it to lint your code, update documentation, commit updated builds, etc....
This is heavily inspired by git-auto-commit-action (by Stefan Zweifel): that action automatically detects changed files and commits them. While this is useful for most situations, this doesn't commit untracked files and can sometimes commit unintended changes (such as package-lock.json
or similar, that may have happened during previous steps).
This action lets you choose the path that you want to use when adding & committing changes so that it works as you would normally do using git
on your machine.
Add a step like this to your workflow:
- uses: EndBug/add-and-commit@v4 # You can change this to use a specific version
with:
# The arguments for the `git add` command (see the paragraph below for more info)
# Default: '.'
add: 'src'
# The name of the user that will be displayed as the author of the commit
# Default: author of the commit that triggered the run
author_name: Your Name
# The email of the user that will be displayed as the author of the commit
# Default: author of the commit that triggered the run
author_email: [email protected]
# The local path to the directory where your repository is located. You should use actions/checkout first to set it up
# Default: '.'
cwd: './path/to/the/repo'
# Whether to use the --force option on `git add`, in order to bypass eventual gitignores
# Default: false
force: true
# The message for the commit
# Default: 'Commit from GitHub Actions'
message: 'Your commit message'
# The arguments for the `git rm` command (see the paragraph below for more info)
# Default: ''
remove: "./dir/old_file.js"
env:
# This is necessary in order to push a commit to the repo
GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} # Leave this line unchanged
The only env
variable required is the token for the action to run: GitHub generates one automatically, but you need to pass it through env
to make it available to actions. You can find more about GITHUB_TOKEN
here.
That said, you can just copy the example line and not worry about it. If you do want to use a different token you can pass that in, but I wouldn't see any possible advantage in doing so.
The action adds files using a regular git add
command, so you can put every kind of argument in the add
option. For example, if you don't want it to use a recursive behavior: $(find . -maxdepth 1 -name *.js)
.
The script will not stop if one of the git commands fails. E.g.: if your command shows a "fatal: pathspec 'yourFile' did not match any files" error the action will go on.
You can delete files with the remove
option: that runs a git rm
command that will stage the files in the given path for removal.
The script will not stop if one of the git commands fails. E.g.: if your command shows a "fatal: pathspec 'yourFile' did not match any files" error the action will go on.
Do you want to lint your JavaScript files, located in the src
folder, with ESLint, so that fixable changes are done without your intervention? You can use a workflow like this:
name: Lint source code
on: push
jobs:
run:
name: Lint with ESLint
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Checkout repo
uses: actions/checkout@v2
- name: Set up Node.js
uses: actions/setup-node@v1
with:
node-version: 12.x
- name: Install dependencies
run: npm install
- name: Update source code
run: eslint "src/**" --fix
- name: Commit changes
uses: EndBug/add-and-commit@v4
with:
author_name: Your Name
author_email: [email protected]
message: "Your commit message"
add: "*.js"
env:
GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
If you need to run the action on a repository that is not located in $GITHUB_WORKSPACE
, you can use the cwd
option: the action uses a cd
normal command, so the path should follow bash standards.
name: Use a different repository directory
on: push
jobs:
run:
name: Add a text file
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
# If you need to, you can check out your repo to a different location
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
with:
path: "./pathToRepo/"
# You can make whatever type of change to the repo...
- run: echo "123" > ./pathToRepo/file.txt
# ...and then use the action as you would normally do, but providing the path to the repo
- uses: EndBug/add-and-commit@v4
with:
message: "Add the very useful text file"
add: "*.txt"
cwd: "./pathToRepo/"
force: true
env:
GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
This action is distributed under the MIT license, check the license for more info.