Quickstart

In this demo tutorial, we'll get our hands on a simple hello-world action.

Initialization

Let's generate our action and name it something unique so that we can publish it to the marketplace.

To begin with, once you've installed pyaction, generate a base template for the action.

pyaction init

And here would be the prompting for our action called "PyAction Hello World".

🎤 Action name
   PyAction Hello World
🎤 Action's slug
   pyaction-hello-world
🎤 Short description
   This actions says Hello to you!
🎤 Author's name
   John Doe
🎤 Include workflow testing pipeline
   Yes

Copying from template version None
 identical  .
    create  pyaction-hello-world
    create  pyaction-hello-world/requirements.txt
    create  pyaction-hello-world/.github
    create  pyaction-hello-world/.github/workflows
    create  pyaction-hello-world/.github/workflows/test.yml
    create  pyaction-hello-world/README.md
    create  pyaction-hello-world/action.yml
    create  pyaction-hello-world/Dockerfile
    create  pyaction-hello-world/.dockerignore
    create  pyaction-hello-world/.gitignore
    create  pyaction-hello-world/main.py

✨ Your action `pyaction-hello-world` has been created successfully!
🔗 Visit https://pyaction.imsadra.me/quickstart for a quick demonstration.

Change your current directory to pyaction-hello-world to begin the development.

cd pyaction-hello-world/

Development

Once we get our action initialized, it's time to initialize a Git directory so that we can push it to a GitHub repository and track all the changes.

git init && git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
git branch -M main
git remote add origin git@github.com:<username>/pyaction-hello-world.git #(1)

1. Replace <username> with your GitHub username/organization.

Action Configuration (action.yml)

This YAML file indicates the basic configurations of our action. We can define our action name, description, and branding there. More importantly, this is where we declare the inputs and outputs of our actions. So head over to the inputs:.. line where you should define the inputs and outputs.

Since our action has only one name input, simply declare it as follows.

pyaction-hello-world/action.yml

...

inputs:
  github_token:
    description: The GitHub token
    default: ${{ github.token }}
    required: true

  repository:
    description: The repository name in the form of "<owner>/<repo>"
    default: ${{ github.repository }}
    required: true

  name:
    required: false
    description: the person/thing you want to greet
    default: World

There are two inputs already declared..

github_token and repository inputs are already declared within your workflow environment. You can use them to interact with GitHub.

In addition, our action has an output parameter called phrase as well. Define it this way at the end of the action.yml file.

...

outputs:
  phrase:
    description: output message

Main Executing File (main.py)

This is the main Python file that gets executed when the workflow container gets triggered. In this file, we have access to all the input parameters that users have passed to us from the my_action parameters. All we need to do is to retrieve the name and return the phrase that contains the greeting message.

from pyaction import PyAction

workflow = PyAction()


@workflow.action()
def my_action(name: str) -> None:
    workflow.write(
        {
            "phrase": f"Hi {name}!"
        }
    )

Usage & Deployment

In order to use the action within the repository, update the test.yml file in the following way.

name: Greeting Action

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    name: Running the action
    steps:

      - name: checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Greetings
        id: greetings
        uses: ./
        with:
          name: Jane

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

This way, whenever a push event happens to the main branch, this pipeline gets triggered and tests the action with the value Jane as the name input parameter.

Stage and commit the changes that you've made.

git add . && git commit -m 'updated'

Tag your current state and push your changes to the repository.

git tag v0.1.0
git push origin main --tags

This demo is also live..

The pyaction-hello-world implementation in this tutorial is available here. Feel free to look over it.

Publish to Marketplace

For more information about how you can ship your actions to the GitHub Marketplace, refer to the publishing tutorial page section.