Welcome to PyAction!

PyAction helps you to create and develop custom GitHub Actions using Python.

Actions are individual tasks that you can combine to create jobs and customize your workflow. You can create your own actions, or use and customize actions shared by the GitHub community. GitHub Inc.

This documentation covers a tutorial and a demo hello-world action. Head to Quickstart to see the demo project and create an action in a flash.

Easy to Setup

Make sure you have pip and python>=3.8 installed on your machine and install pyaction.

pip install -U pyaction

Now, execute the following command to see all the subcommands and options.

pyaction --help

It's recommended to..

Initialize a basic template and provide yourself a nicely put-to-gether action structure for starting.

pyaction init

Here you can see a very basic greeting action example that prints a greeting message when someone calls it with a name input parameter.

your-action/main.py .github/workflows/ci.yml

import sys
from typing import List

from pyaction import io


def main(args: List[str]) -> None:
    """main function

    Args:
        args: STDIN arguments
    """

    name = io.read("name")

    io.write(
        {
          "phrase": f"Hi {name}!"
        }
    )


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main(sys.argv[1:])

name: Greeting Action

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    name: Running the action
    steps:
      - name: Greetings
        id: greetings
        uses: you/your-action
        with:
          name: Sadra

      - name: Output
        run: echo ${{ steps.greetings.outputs.phrase }}

▶ Run echo Hi Sadra!
Hi Sadra!

Since pyaction is part of your action's dependencies, you have access to utilities that enable you to work with the repository/workflow information. You can find out more about these utils on the Tutorial page.

How It Works

Custom GitHub Actions can be developed in different ways. PyAction uses the Docker Container method which is highly stable with Python environments. This way, you'll be able to specify the requirements for your actions and run them inside a lightweight isolated container with all the dependencies installed.

If you're interested in the idea and want to help, your contribution is welcome as always. Check out the Contribution Guide for more information.