Has Changes

GitHub action for checking if the repo is dirty (has uncommitted changes).

Why?

This is useful for things like checking if you need to open a pull request for any changes that may be introduced through another action.

How?

Add a step in a job after any steps whose code changes you want to check.

You will then be able to check the status in subsequent steps.

You do this by checking if changed is equal to 1.

The value will be 0 if no code has been changed by any previous steps.

Example

name: Has Changes
jobs:
  has-changes:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      with:
        ref: ${{ github.head_ref }}
    - name: Make changes
      run: touch change.temp
    # This step will evaluate the repo status and report the change
    - name: Check if there are changes
      id: changes
      uses: UnicornGlobal/[email protected]
    # You can now access a variable indicating if there have been changes
    - name: Process changes
      if: steps.changes.outputs.changed == 1
      run: echo "Changes exist"

The example shows that adding a step to check the status will expose the status on the ${{ steps.changes.outputs.changed }} variable.

The steps.changes is defined by the id: changes. If you change the id value then the step name must change too (as it references the id).