GitHub Action
Expose Tunnel
Easily create tunnels to access your GitHub Action workflows from public endpoints.
There are many services and tools that exist to create tunnels to your localhost and create a public URL that other people can access those services on:
- Create tunnels from various supported services (localhost.run and bore.pub)
- Provide fallback strategies if the primary service is unavailable
- Makes the tunnel URL easily accessible to other steps in your workflow
This action makes it easy to do this from within a GitHub Action, which can be a powerful and easy way to interact with services you have running inside the workflows, or even create Preview Environments so that reviewers can easily test your changes, or you can share the generated URL to users in your organization that might not be on GitHub.
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: Starting services
run: echo "Start up your services before exposing them...."
- uses: codetalkio/expose-tunnel@v1.5.0
id: expose-tunnel
with:
service: bore.pub
port: 8080
- name: Accessing the tunnel url
run: echo "Tunnel has been started at '${{ steps.expose-tunnel.outputs.tunnel-url }}'"
- name: Keep tunnel alive for a defined time
run: timeout 30m sleep 7200 # Stop on whichever we reach first (30m or 2hour sleep).The following arguments are supported:
| Argument | Required | Description | Default | Options |
|---|---|---|---|---|
service |
Yes | Which tunneling service to use | N/A | - bore.pub (managed service) - bore.selfhosted (self-hosting) - localhost.run (managed service) |
port |
Yes | The local port we are creating a tunnel to | 80 |
Any port you want |
selfHostedEndpoint |
No, unless bore.selfhosted was specified as the service |
The endpoint to the self-hosted service | N/A | N/A |
fallback |
No | Fallback strategy if the preferred service isn't available (e.g. self-hosted is down, fallback to managed service) |
'[]' |
All services |
blocking |
No | If the step should block and keep the job alive for the specified amount of time. This means you won't be able to use the output in later steps since the tunnel will be closing after the step. | false |
false or any minute number, specificed as <num>m e.g. 30m (max is 120m) |
Putting all these into play could look like this:
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: Starting services
run: echo "Start up your services before exposing them...."
- uses: codetalkio/expose-tunnel@v1.5.0
id: expose-tunnel
with:
service: bore.selfhosted
port: 8080
selfHostedEndpoint: my-own-servers.run
fallback: '["bore.pub", "localhost.run"]'
blocking: 30m # Only do this if you do not plan to do anything with the tunnel url.Here's a couple of common usecases for the expose-tunnel action, and how you can integrate them into your own work environment.
Start up services and create the tunnel environment when a comment or the first part of a Pull Request starts with the defined trigger (/preview in the example here), using the pull-request-comment-trigger action:
- uses: khan/pull-request-comment-trigger@master
id: check
with:
trigger: '/preview'
reaction: rocket
prefix_only: true
env:
GITHUB_TOKEN: '${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}'
- uses: actions/checkout@v3
if: steps.check.outputs.triggered == 'true'
- name: Starting services
if: steps.check.outputs.triggered == 'true'
run: echo "Start up your services before exposing them...."
- uses: codetalkio/expose-tunnel@v1.5.0
if: steps.check.outputs.triggered == 'true'
id: expose-tunnel
with:
service: bore.pub
port: 8080
# Check the other usecases for posting the URL on the Pull Request or in Slack.
# ...
- name: Keep tunnel alive for a defined time
run: timeout 30m sleep 7200 # Stop on whichever we reach first (30m or 2hour sleep).We can easily use GitHub's own scripting action to post a comment on a Pull Request:
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: Starting services
run: echo "Start up your services before exposing them...."
- uses: codetalkio/expose-tunnel@v1.5.0
id: expose-tunnel
with:
service: bore.pub
port: 8080
- name: Post tunnel url as comment on PR
uses: actions/github-script@v6
with:
github-token: ${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}}
script: |
github.rest.issues.createComment({
issue_number: context.issue.number,
owner: context.repo.owner,
repo: context.repo.repo,
body: `**Preview Environment:** ${{ steps.expose-tunnel.outputs.tunnel-url }}`
})
- name: Keep tunnel alive for a defined time
run: timeout 30m sleep 7200 # Stop on whichever we reach first (30m or 2hour sleep).Alternatively, check out add-pr-comment as a different way of posting the comment:
# ...
- name: Post tunnel url as comment on PR
uses: mshick/add-pr-comment@v1
with:
message: |
**Preview Environment:** ${{ steps.expose-tunnel.outputs.tunnel-url }}
allow-repeats: true
env:
GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
# ...steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v3
- name: Starting services
run: echo "Start up your services before exposing them...."
- uses: codetalkio/expose-tunnel@v1.5.0
id: expose-tunnel
with:
service: bore.pub
port: 8080
# Post to Slack (see https://github.com/slackapi/slack-github-action#technique-2-slack-app for details on how to post to Slack).
- uses: slackapi/slack-github-action@v1.23.0
with:
channel-id: 'preview-channel'
slack-message: "Preview Environment: ${{ steps.expose-tunnel.outputs.tunnel-url }}"
env:
SLACK_BOT_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.SLACK_BOT_TOKEN }}
- name: Keep tunnel alive for a defined time
run: timeout 30m sleep 7200 # Stop on whichever we reach first (30m or 2hour sleep).