deployment-action

A GitHub action to create Deployments as part of your GitHub CI workflows.

Action inputs

name	description
initial_status	(Optional) Initial status for the deployment. Must be one of the accepted strings
token	GitHub token
target_url	(Optional) The target URL. This should be the URL of the app once deployed
description	(Optional) A description to give the environment
auto_merge	(Optional - default is false) Whether to attempt to auto-merge the default branch into the branch that the action is running on if set to "true". More details in the GitHub deployments API. Warning - setting this to "true" has caused this action to fail in some cases
ref	(Optional) The ref to deploy. This can be a branch, tag, or SHA. More details in the GitHub deployments API.

Action outputs

name	description
deployment_id	The ID of the deployment as returned by the GitHub API

Example usage

name: Deploy

on: [push]

jobs:
  deploy:
    name: Deploy my app

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v1

      - uses: chrnorm/deployment-action@releases/v1
        name: Create GitHub deployment
        id: deployment
        with:
          token: "${{ github.token }}"
          target_url: http://my-app-url.com
          environment: production
        # more steps below where you run your deployment scripts inside the same action

Notes

Heads up! Currently, there is a GitHub Actions limitation where events fired inside an action will not trigger further workflows. If you use this action in your workflow, it will not trigger any "Deployment" workflows. Thanks to @rclayton-the-terrible for finding a workaround for this:

While not ideal, if you use a token that is not the Action's GITHUB_TOKEN, this will work. I define a secret called GITHUB_DEPLOY_TOKEN and use that for API calls.

A workaround for this is to create the Deployment, perform the deployment steps, and then trigger an action to create a Deployment Status using my other action: chrnorm/deployment-status.

For example:

name: Deploy

on: [push]

jobs:
  deploy:
    name: Deploy my app

    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v1

      - uses: chrnorm/deployment-action@releases/v1
        name: Create GitHub deployment
        id: deployment
        with:
          token: "${{ github.token }}"
          target_url: http://my-app-url.com
          environment: production

      - name: Deploy my app
        run: |
          # add your deployment code here

      - name: Update deployment status (success)
        if: success()
        uses: chrnorm/deployment-status@releases/v1
        with:
          token: "${{ github.token }}"
          target_url: http://my-app-url.com
          state: "success"
          deployment_id: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.deployment_id }}

      - name: Update deployment status (failure)
        if: failure()
        uses: chrnorm/deployment-status@releases/v1
        with:
          token: "${{ github.token }}"
          target_url: http://my-app-url.com
          state: "failure"
          deployment_id: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs.deployment_id }}