
Show HN: ActionsPanel – Manually Trigger Your GitHub Actions - abatilo
Hi all!<p>I wanted to share a small project that I&#x27;ve been working on with a buddy.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.actionspanel.app&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.actionspanel.app&#x2F;</a><p>One of the problems that currently exists with GitHub Actions is the fact that there is no way to easily trigger your Actions unless you cause some kind of GitHub event. This could be pushing a new commit, or creating an issue on a repository. But if you just want to run an arbitrary action, there&#x27;s not currently a good way to do that.<p>This is a well known feature request:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.community&#x2F;t5&#x2F;GitHub-Actions&#x2F;GitHub-Actions-Manual-Trigger-Approvals&#x2F;td-p&#x2F;31504" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.community&#x2F;t5&#x2F;GitHub-Actions&#x2F;GitHub-Actions-Ma...</a><p>GitHub somewhat recently added an API for `repository_dispatch` which is an available trigger for a GitHub Action. There are many blog posts that explain how you can create a Personal Access Token to send your own `repository_dispatch` via some curl command or postman request.<p>For example:
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goobar.io&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;07&#x2F;manually-trigger-a-github-actions-workflow&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;goobar.io&#x2F;2019&#x2F;12&#x2F;07&#x2F;manually-trigger-a-github-actio...</a><p>ActionsPanel uses this same API but does so with a GitHub App token so that you don&#x27;t need to worry about managing your own PAT. This also makes it much easier to trigger your actions across teams with multiple people. Then you don&#x27;t need to share the PAT with each other or each create your own PATs.<p>You configure your buttons with a declarative yaml file that you leave in the repo, and ActionsPanel will read that file and dynamically create your UI for you to trigger your actions.<p>We&#x27;d love to get your feedback on this project. It&#x27;s very simple still but solves the core problem of triggering your actions.<p>If you do have feedback or any questions, feel free to post in this thread, or email us directly at support (at) actionspanel (dot) app<p>Looking forward to your feedback!
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warmuuh
you can also use [https://greasyfork.org/de/scripts/394032-github-
deployments-...](https://greasyfork.org/de/scripts/394032-github-deployments-
and-repository-dispatch-trigger) which adds a button for repository_dispatch
event directly in your repository, no need to visit a 3party page.

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abatilo
That's a really cool idea that I never thought of.

One of my concerns would be that now you need every developer on your team to
install this to their browser, but if you're working alone, this could
absolutely be an easy solution!

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riquito
I saw it working with teams too, it becomes part of the onboarding, and as
soon as you have one feature used everyday nobody forgets (or anyway everyone
else will remind you soon enough).

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csullivan84
I'm one of the creators of ActionsPanel. As an early adopter of GitHub
Actions, this was an obvious feature gap that made it harder to switch off of
other CI/CD systems (Jenkins, Circle, etc).

It's been great having a centralized place for all of our code and deployment
related activities. The GitHub Actions ecosystem is maturing quickly and we'd
like to help with that momentum.

\--Charles

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bswinnerton
Could you also use the repository dispatch custom event?
[https://help.github.com/en/actions/reference/events-that-
tri...](https://help.github.com/en/actions/reference/events-that-trigger-
workflows#external-events-repository_dispatch)

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abatilo
Hey @bswinnerton, that's exactly what we're doing. At this point, we're just
basically managing your access token for you via a GitHub App instead of a
personal Access Token

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bswinnerton
Oh, nice!

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soylentgraham
My biggest problem is having to commit to test changes whilst I'm
writing/debugging an action, can this help with that? And if not, does anyone
have a good solution for testing an action before committing? If it helps im
already using self hosted runners.

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abatilo
You might find some success with one of these projects:

* [https://github.com/nektos/act](https://github.com/nektos/act) * [https://github.com/phishy/wflow](https://github.com/phishy/wflow)

~~~
soylentgraham
oh cool, last time I looked I only found ones that didn't support YAML.

Any chance you've used either of these?

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eMerzh
Nice I was looking to test this at work... But not sure if login does not work
for me (and my buddy) or something else.... But we kept beeing redirected to
the login button

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csullivan84
Sorry about that. It seem like we have a small bug in our redirection logic
for new logins. If you hard refresh the page after you've logged in with
GitHub it should work.

We'll get this corrected shortly. Thank you for the feedback.

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eMerzh
hum, still stuck at [https://www.actionspanel.app/auth/sign-
in?next=/app](https://www.actionspanel.app/auth/sign-in?next=/app) ... trying
to go to /app but redirect there again... clicking the button "does nothing"
(goes to github and back in a glimpse).

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abatilo
We've fixed at least two different bugs that have caused this problem since
posting to HN. Please let us know if you're still seeing it. It's been a hard
one to reproduce!

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thecodrr
Hey, very amazing tool. It was one of the features I missed the most. Thanks a
lot!

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infinitone
Are Github Actions out of beta? I haven't heard any updates about them but i
seems its an abandoned feature??

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abatilo
[https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/github-actions-is-now-a-
ci...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/08/github-actions-is-now-a-ci-cd-
service/)

They went GA last November! There's still changes happening for sure, just
much slower after going GA.

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v_paliy
Nice!

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abatilo
Thank you!

