Actions Starter

Quickly configure repos for writing new GitHub Actions

Installation

Install with npm globally:

npm install --global actions-starter

Setup Project

Before running this command, create an empty repository on GitHub and an empty folder on your local computer. Then run actions init --repo <url> to initialize the repo. For example:

mkdir test-starter
cd test-starter
actions init --repo https://github.com/dhadka/test-starter

The result is a simple hello world example with default settings, including Lint, prettier, Jest for testing, and a GitHub Actions CI workflow. This simple project can be further configured with the various options, including:

--project - The project name. If not specified, defaults to the folder name.

--shortDescription - A short description for the project.

--license - The license to use, such as MIT. This will also add the LICENSE text.

--test - Use jest (default) or mocha for testing.

--initialVersion - The initial version. If not specified, defaults to 1.0.0.

--deps - One or more additional dependencies to install.

--devDeps - One or more additional development dependencies to install.

Publish Project

Use actions publish to increment the package version, commit and tag the new version, and push everything to GitHub. Similar to npm version, you can specify the version field to increment, such as major, minor, or patch.

actions publish           # Publish the current version
actions publish minor     # Increment the minor version field and publish

In addition to creating the full version number, such as v1.2.0, this command also creates a tag for the major version number, such as v1. This encourages consumers of your action to target the major version only so they are always running the most recent version. You can optionally use --latest to also create or update the latest tag.

Other Commands

actions edit     # Open in VSCode
actions open     # Open the GitHub repo in your browser
actions docs     # Open the GitHub Actions documentation