GitHub Actions: How to view inputs for workflow_dispatch?

Question

My idea here is to write my inputs from workflow_dispatch on each pipeline run. .

For example, in Bitbucket pipelines input parameters shown after custom -

Is there a way to do something similar for GitHub?

Answer 1

Although this does not directly answer your question, I'm adding it here because this is where I landed looking for the answer on how to output all my workflow inputs.

In my case I am using a workflow_dispatch trigger - YMMV if you are using a different trigger, but I suspect it would work the same way.

As with the other answer proposed, you will need to do this as a step within your job:

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      myInput:
        default: "my input value"
jobs:
  myJob:
    steps:
      - name: Output Inputs
        run: echo "${{ toJSON(github.event.inputs) }}"

This will result in output you can view in your GitHub action execution output with the inputs serialized as JSON:

{
  "myInput": "my input value"
}

Answer 2

If you have only a few simple input values (from workflow_dispatch) then you can include them in the name of the job:

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      my_value:
        description: 'My input value'
        required: true
        default: 'foo'
        type: string

jobs:
  my_job:
    name: "My job [my_value: ${{ github.event.inputs.my_value }}]"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    ....

This way you will be able to see the input directly in the GitHub UI.

Answer 3

You can use the run-name parameter to change the name of the run in the actions list:

Example of run-name

run-name: Deploy to ${{ inputs.deploy_target }} by @${{ github.actor }}

Be aware that, if you are using Github Enterprise server, this parameter was introduced in version 3.8.

Answer 4

You cannot really alter how they will be displayed on the list I'm afraid.

All you can do is to log your input variables inside action itself, like this:

jobs:
  debugInputs:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - run: |
        echo "Var1: ${{ github.event.inputs.var1 }}"
        echo "Var2: ${{ github.event.inputs.var2 }}" 

If you want to see them in summary, you can use a notice or warning message mark:

Answer 5

I was looking for something similar and landed on logging + writing to the Job Summary.

I created a small action that can easily be used as a first step in your workflow, since I found myself need

Answer 6

It's probably easiest to set the run-name of the workflow and parse that for workflow_dispatch inputs.

But, if you want to retrieve the workflow_dispatch objects for workflows that have already been ran, the data is only available in the logs.

Admittedly a little hacky, but this script does just that (loops through a list of workflow runs, downloads/extracts logs, and uses sed to extract the inputs): https://github.com/joshjohanning/github-misc-scripts/blob/main/gh-cli/get-workflow-dispatch-inputs.sh

This will return something such as:

[
  {
    "workflowName": "workflow-b",
    "workflowId": "5870059990",
    "inputs": {
      "animal": "bee",
      "color": "orange",
      "food": "avocado"
    },
    "createdAt": "2023-08-15T17:45:21Z",
    "conclusion": "success"
  }
],