Enabling caching by default has demonstrated improved workflow performance, and can reduce build times by 20-40% for repositories with dependencies greater than 100 MB! This change has been made to the latest setup-go Action(V4). Developers no longer have to specify the cache: true parameter in their YAML file to obtain the benefits of caching. For more information on building, testing, and caching dependencies with Go, check out the docs here!
In addition to Ubuntu & Windows, GitHub Actions now attaches a SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) to hosted runner image releases for macOS. In the context of GitHub Actions hosted runners, an SBOM details the software pre-installed on the virtual machine that is running your Actions workflows. This is useful in the situation where there is a vulnerability detected, you will be able to quickly tell if you are affected or not. If you are building artifacts, you can include this SBOM in your bill of materials for a comprehensive list of everything that went into creating your software.
To check out the new files, head over to the runner-images repository release page now or check out our docs for more information.
If you use versioned reusable workflows in GitHub Actions, you can now use Dependabot version updates to keep those workflows up-to-date in your repositories! This is useful for anyone using reusable workflows and pinning references to them from the caller workflow, either by commit SHA or by tag.
Starting today, we are enabling administrators to bypass all protection rules on a given environment (break glass) and force the pending jobs referencing the environment to proceed.
For more information, visit Using environments for deployment.
GitHub Actions Importer is now generally available to all GitHub users. You can now easily plan, forecast, and automate migrations from Azure DevOps, CircleCI, GitLab, Jenkins, and Travis CI to GitHub Actions. GitHub Actions Importer is a free extension of the official GitHub CLI and provides you with the confidence to migrate your CI/CD pipelines to continue delivering software efficiently.
For details on how to get started, please check out our documentation. For questions and feedback, visit the GitHub Actions Importer community.
People on the paid Team and Enterprise plans can now sign up for a beta to get access to new and powerful macOS runners for x64. Access is requested via the beta sign-up page. Once your request has been approved, an email will be sent with additional details. The new XL runner option provides developers with 12 cores to execute their Actions workflows on and improve build times.
To learn more visit the docs. Information on pricing for the new macOS XL runner is here.
We are making changes to job summaries and logs in GitHub Actions that will impact customers using self-hosted runners. Over the next six months, customers using self-hosted runners will need to ensure machines have appropriate network access to communicate with the GitHub hosts below so that job summaries and logs emitted from Actions workflows can work as expected.
actions-results-receiver-production.githubapp.comproductionresultssa*.blob.core.windows.netAfter July 31, 2023, if you are using self-hosted runners and have not updated your network access settings to allow the aforementioned hosts, your job summaries and logs may not display correctly.
For more details see
Communication between self-hosted runners and GitHub.
For questions, visit the GitHub Actions community.
To see what's next for Actions, visit our public roadmap.
Introducing new push notifications for Actions on Mobile!
Get notified when your workflow runs have succeeded or failed on the go. You can also opt-in to receive notifications for failed workflows only. Head over to the in-app settings, where you can enable these new push types and prioritize what matters to you.
Read more about GitHub Mobile and send us your feedback to help us improve.
OpenID Connect (OIDC) support in GitHub Actions enables secure cloud deployments using short-lived tokens that are automatically rotated for each deployment.
Each OIDC token includes standard claims like the audience, issuer, subject and many more custom claims that uniquely define the workflow job that generated the token. These claims can be used to define fine grained trust policies to control the access to specific cloud roles and resources.
actor_id, repository_id, repository_owner_idworkflow_ref, workflow_sha and job_workflow_sha – to help uniquely verify the source of a workflow job, even if the job references a reusable workflow.
These changes enable developers to define more advanced access policies using OpenID connect and do more secure cloud deployments at scale with GitHub Actions.
Learn more about Security hardening your GitHub Workflows using OpenID Connect.
GitHub Actions hosted runner images are now more secure than ever, with the ability to see exactly what software is pre-installed on the image that was used by the runner during your build. GitHub now attaches a software bill of materials (SBOM) as an asset to each image release for Ubuntu and Windows. Support for Mac runners is targeted for Q1 2023.
In the context of GitHub Actions hosted runners, an SBOM details the software pre-installed on the virtual machine that is running your Actions workflows. This is useful in the situation where there is a vulnerability detected, you will be able to quickly tell if you are affected or not. If you are building artifacts, you can include this SBOM in your bill of materials for a comprehensive list of everything that went into creating your software.
To check out the new files, head over to the runner-images repository release page now or check out our docs for more information.
The actions and reusable workflows from private repositories can now be shared with other private repositories within the same organization, user account, or enterprise.
See managing the repository settings and managing the enterprise repository settings to allow access to workflows in other repositories.
We have also added the API support to configure Actions share policy. Refer to API support or API support for Enterprise for more details.
Learn more about Sharing actions and workflows from your private repository, Sharing actions and workflows with your organization, and Sharing Actions and workflows with your enterprise.
Previously, data generated from Checks were not managed by a retention policy and would therefore grow unbounded. A recent change was made to GitHub.com that archives checks data after 400 days and deletes records 30 days after they are archived.
This change will be extended to GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) version 3.8 with additional features that will allow administrators to:
This pertains to all Checks data, including those that are generated from GitHub Actions and the Statuses API.
For questions, visit the GitHub community or get started with Checks API today.
We are excited to announce that GitHub app in Slack and Microsoft Teams now supports GitHub Actions workflow notifications.
You can now subscribe to your repository and get notified about GitHub Actions workflow run status from your channel or personal app.
/github subscribe owner/repo workflows
Getting notified about each and every workflow run can be noisy. So, we are providing you capability to filter the notifications based on your requirement. You can filter your actions workflows notifications based on name, event, actor and/or branch. You can filter the notifications as below.
/github subscribe owner/repo workflows:{name:"your workflow name" event:"workflow event" branch:"branch name" actor:"actor name"}
Note: When you configure workflow notifications without passing any filters, it is configured by default for workflows triggered via pull requests targeting your default branch.
For more information, please visit the GitHub app guidance for Slack and Microsoft Teams.
Larger runner workflows using the ubuntu-latest runner label will soon run on Ubuntu-22.04.
Ubuntu-22.04 is now the default version for the ubuntu-latest label for GitHub Actions standard runners workflows. Larger runners will now use the Ubuntu-22.04 as the -latest version starting 15 December 2022.
If you see any issues with your workflows when they are transitioned to Ubuntu-22.04:
ubuntu-20.04 runner label. We will continue to support Ubuntu 20.04.Note that image software between Ubuntu-20.04 and Ubuntu-22.04 differs by the pre-installed and default versions versions of some tools. See the full list.
A GitHub Actions workflow run is made up of one or more jobs and each job is associated with a check run. The workflow_job webhook is sent during state transitions of a workflow job. The job state is included in the webhook payload as the action property, which currently takes the values of queued, in_progress, or completed.
With this change, the workflow_job webhook will now support a new waiting state whenever a job is waiting on an environment protection rule, aligning with the waiting state of the corresponding check run. This enables better insight into the progress of a job when using environment protection rules.
In addition, when a job refers to an environment key in its YAML definition, the resulting workflow_job webhook payload will also include a new property, deployment with the metadata about the deployment created by the check run.
Learn more about using environments for deployment Jobs in a Workflow
For questions, visit the GitHub Actions community.
To see what's next for Actions, visit our public roadmap.
We’ve launched a public preview of GitHub Actions Importer, which helps you forecast, plan, and automate migrations from your current CI/CD tool to GitHub Actions.
Doing individual migrations is relatively easy in isolation. However, for those that have a large and established CI/CD footprint, having tooling available to assist with migrations is key to their ability to adopt Actions at scale. In the time that we’ve been developing and using GitHub Actions Importer in its private preview form, we’ve encountered numerous customers that have thousands of pipelines—even in excess of 15K—in their legacy environments that need to be migrated. GitHub Actions Importer is designed to help when manual migration is not feasible, such as when users have a large number of teams that depend on hundreds or thousands of workflows.
Sign up here to request access to the public preview. Once you've been added, you will receive an email at the address registered on your GitHub account with instructions for getting started.
To learn more, see Automating migrations with GitHub Actions Importer and the announcement post on the GitHub blog.
You can now require approval from a user with write permissions to the repository before a workflow run can be triggered from a private fork. This can be useful for some inner source scenarios, where you want to ensure that the code is reviewed before it is run.
Learn more about enabling workflows for forks of private repositories
For questions, visit the GitHub Actions community.
To see what's next for Actions, visit our public roadmap.
Workflows using the ubuntu-latest runner label will soon run on Ubuntu-22.04.
Ubuntu 22.04 became generally available on GitHub-hosted runners in August 2022. Now Ubuntu-22.04 is ready to be the default version for the ubuntu-latest label in GitHub Actions workflows. This change will be rolled out over a period of 8 weeks beginning on October 1, 2022.
If you see any issues with your workflows when they are transitioned to Ubuntu-22.04:
ubuntu-20.04 runner label. We will continue to support Ubuntu 20.04.Note that image software between Ubuntu-20.04 and Ubuntu-22.04 differs by the pre-installed and default versions versions of some tools. See the full list.
Customers can now deterministically restrict their workflows to run on a specific set of runners using the names of their runner groups in the runs-on key of their workflow YAML. This prevents the unintended case where your job runs on a runner outside your intended group because the unintended runner shared the same labels as the runners in your intended runner group.
Example of the new syntax to ensure a runner is targeted from your intended runner group:
runs-on:
group: my-group
labels: [ self-hosted, label-1 ]In addition to the workflow file syntax changes, there are also new validation checks for runner groups at the organization level. Organizations will no longer be able to create runner groups using a name that already exists at the enterprise level. A warning banner will display for any existing duplicate runner groups at the organization level. There's no restriction on the creation of runner groups at the enterprise level.
This feature change applies to enterprise plan customers as only enterprise plan customers are able to create runner groups.
Starting today, customers can now enjoy larger runners without any pre-configuration work. GitHub now automatically creates a default runner group configured with four larger runners of our most popular sizes so users can start using larger runners right away.
The default runner group is called "Default Larger Runners" and can be managed by Organization or Enterprise admins. To begin using these runners, simply add the label corresponding to the runner of your choice to your workflow file.
| Description | Label | Image |
|---|---|---|
| 4-cores Ubuntu Runner | ubuntu-latest-4-cores |
Ubuntu – Latest |
| 8-cores Ubuntu Runner | ubuntu-latest-8-cores |
Ubuntu – Latest |
| 16-cores Ubuntu Runner | ubuntu-latest-16-cores |
Ubuntu – Latest |
| 8-cores Windows Runner | windows-latest-8-cores |
Windows Server – Latest |
Note that this change only applies to customers who are onboarded to the beta on October 20, 2022 and later.
Interested in learning more about larger hosted runners? Read the announcement here or sign up for the beta here