Actions: Required workflows

[github-product-roadmap]

Summary

Required workflows allow DevOps teams / CICD system administrators to define mandated workflows to run during the lifecycle of a repository’s pipeline. Individual development teams at the repository level will be able to see what required workflows have been applied to their repository, what actions that workflow performs, and whom to contact if they have questions.

In addition to reducing duplication of CI/CD configuration code, required workflows can also help companies with the following use cases:

• Security: Invoke external vulnerability scoring or dynamic analysis tools beyond CodeQL or Dependabot.
• Correctness and Compliance: Ensure that all code meets an enterprise’s quality standards. e.g., Enforce consistent code syntax conventions, or ensure that unit test coverage meets a minimum level before deployments are permitted.
• Deployment: Ensure that code is continuously deployed in a standard way.

Intended Outcome

Required workflows allows DevOps teams to define and enforce standard CI/CD practices across many source code repositories within an organization without needing to configure each repository individually, which becomes an impossible task in large organizations.

How will it work?

Workflow documents can be selected by an administrator from any repository in an organization (the "source" repo or "imposer" repo) and applied to one or more target repositories (the "imposee"). The first version of required workflows will support workflows using the pull_request webhook only.

[ankneis]

🚢 This has shipped to dotcom: https://github.blog/changelog/2023-01-10-github-actions-support-for-organization-wide-required-workflows-public-beta. Leaving open to track for GHES release!

[ankneis]

This shipped with GHES 3.8: https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.8/admin/release-notes