References in GitHub workflows and composite actions

Enabling a GitHub composite action to call another action in the same repo.

This can be done with reusable workflows, but not yet composite actions: github.blog/changelog/2022-01-25-github-actions-reusable-workflows-can-be-referenced-locally

The problem

When running a composite action (even in a reusable workflow), I want to be able to use the same GitHub ref for the actions that exist within the remote repo. For instance, I have an actions monorepo and would like to have some of my composite actions be able to call another action within the actions monorepo using the version (ref) that the action is using.

For example, the check-semver-labels action calls the label-checker action:

    - name: Check for semantic version labels
      uses: rwaight/actions/github/label-checker@main  # can use version specific or main
      #uses: rwaight/actions/github/label-checker@v1
      id: semver-labels-check
      with:
        prefix_mode: true
        one_of: ${{ inputs.semver-prefix }}
        #none_of: "skip-changelog"
        allow_failure: ${{ inputs.allow-failure }}
        repo_token: ${{ inputs.gh-token }}

References

• GitHub actions/toolkit
  • #1264 make reference accessible in reusable workflow
• GitHub actions/runner
  • #2417 Property job_workflow_sha in context github is not available
• GitHub Community Discussions
  • #18601 Accessing Composite Action within Reusable Workflow from called workflow repo
  • #41927 Calling a sibling composite action using the same ref
  • #111928 Calling a composite action from an external workflow using the same ref used in the caller workflow

Potential solutions

Here are some potential solutions:

• Get reusable workflow version action
  • canonical/get-workflow-version-action

    GitHub composite action to get commit SHA that GitHub Actions reusable workflow was called with Workaround for actions/toolkit#1264