pin-github-action

This is a tool that allows you to pin your GitHub actions dependencies to a specific sha without requiring that you update every action manually each time you want to use a newer version of an action.

It achieves this by converting your workflow to use a specific commit hash, whilst adding the original value as a comment on that line. This allows us to resolve newer shas for that target ref automatically in the future.

It converts this:

name: Commit Push
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
jobs:
  build:
    name: nexmo/github-actions/submodule-auto-pr@master
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@master
    - name: nexmo/github-actions/submodule-auto-pr
      uses: nexmo/github-actions/submodule-auto-pr@master

In to this:

name: Commit Push
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
jobs:
  build:
    name: nexmo/github-actions/submodule-auto-pr@master
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@db41740e12847bb616a339b75eb9414e711417df # pin@master
      - name: nexmo/github-actions/submodule-auto-pr
        uses: nexmo/github-actions/submodule-auto-pr@73549280c1c566830040d9a01fe9050dae6a3036 # pin@master

For more information, see How it works.

Installation

npm install -g pin-github-action

Usage

pin-github-action /path/to/.github/workflows/your-name.yml

If you use private actions (or are hitting rate limits), you'll need to provide a GitHub access token:

GH_ADMIN_TOKEN=<your-token-here> pin-github-action /path/to/.github/workflows/your-name.yml

Run it as many times as you like! Each time you run the tool the exact sha will be updated to the latest available sha for your pinned ref.

How it works

• Load the workflow file provided
• Tokenise it in to an AST
• Extract all uses steps, skipping any docker:// or ./local-path actions
• Loop through all uses steps to determine the target ref
  • If there's a comment in the step, remove pin@ and use that as the target
  • Otherwise, fall back to the ref in the action as the default
• Look up the current sha for each repo on GitHub and update the action to use the specific hash
  • If needed, add a comment with the target pinned version
• Write the workflow file with the new pinned version and original target version as a comment