Re-using your Github Action Workflow

Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash

Did you ever get stuck where you need to copy-paste your Github action workflow across files and couldn't find a way to reuse them,

Here I am with an article that will give you a new idea on the beta feature from Github to reuse your workflows across files

What are workflows?

workflow process

Each workflow contains a set of jobs can be simplified as testing, deploy or check lint, further a jobs are divided into steps which are more simplified versions of process inside

Create reusable workflow

To create a reusable workflow we need to attach a different dispatcher then regular onPush or onPR, you need to include onWorkflowCall which will trigger the workflow inside a workflow

Limitation and options

Before creating a workflow, try understand the things you should keep in mind such as

• A reusable workflow cannot be reused inside another reusable workflow

• You can not inherit the variable from where you are calling, you need to explicit pass the variables

• A Workflow can contains other triggers than onWorkflowCall

• You can only use reusable workflow if they are public, inside same repo or same organization

Get Started

To begin with, you can create a file inside .github/workflows/sample-test.yml or similar

on:  
 workflow_call:
    inputs:
      image_name:
        required: true
        type: string
      tag:
         type: string
    secrets:
      registry_username:
        required: true
      registry_password:
        required: true

jobs:  
 build:
// your steps...

Here you can create a workflow by using the key workflow_call and pass the variable using input and encrypted input as secrets

Now whatever you write inside the jobs will get run if you call this workflow

How to call?

Moving ahead, there might be a question that how to call this workflow inside another

To use a workflow you should follow the same process as regular workflow file but main area would be, inside jobs

You can create a separate

jobs:

..other jobs 

docker:    
 uses: n3wt0n/ReusableWorkflow/.github/workflows/buildAndPublishDockerImage.yml@main    
 with:
      image_name: my-awesome-app
      tag: $GITHUB_RUN_NUMBER    
secrets:
      registry_username: ${{secrets.REGISTRY_USERNAME}}
      registry_password: ${{secrets.REGISTRY_PASSWORD}}

That’s all you need to do. After doing this you can run and reuse any number of workflows in your project

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Thanks!

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Re-using your Github Action Workflow was originally published in Nerd For Tech on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.