PollyAction

A free, MIT-licensed retry/backoff wrapper for any GitHub Actions step.

Flaky network calls, rate-limited package registries, transient cloud API errors — CI jobs fail for reasons that have nothing to do with your code. PollyAction wraps any shell command with configurable exponential-backoff retries, so a blip doesn't fail your whole pipeline.

Named after (and built by the same author as) the Polly-inspired Swevo Polly* package family — 28+ free, MIT-licensed .NET resilience packages. Same philosophy, brought to your CI pipeline instead of your app code.

Why

Commercial CI platforms bundle "retry step" as a paid or Enterprise-only feature. Some marketplace actions charge, or bury retry behind bloated all-in-one toolkits. PollyAction does one thing — retry a command with exponential backoff — for free, with no telemetry, no lock-in, no account.

Usage

- name: Restore packages (with retry)
  uses: Swevo/PollyAction@v1
  with:
    command: dotnet restore
    max-attempts: 5
    backoff-seconds: 2
    backoff-multiplier: 2

That's it. dotnet restore will be retried up to 5 times, waiting 2s, then 4s, then 8s, then 16s between attempts (exponential backoff), before the step is marked as failed.

Full example

- name: Push to NuGet (with retry)
  uses: Swevo/PollyAction@v1
  with:
    command: dotnet nuget push *.nupkg --api-key ${{ secrets.NUGET_API_KEY }} --source https://api.nuget.org/v3/index.json
    max-attempts: 4
    backoff-seconds: 3
    backoff-multiplier: 2
    max-backoff-seconds: 30
    timeout-minutes: 2
    shell: bash
    working-directory: ./nupkgs

Inputs

Input	Default	Description
command	(required)	The shell command to run and retry on failure.
max-attempts	3	Maximum number of attempts before giving up.
backoff-seconds	2	Initial delay (seconds) before the first retry.
backoff-multiplier	2	Multiplier applied to the delay after each failed attempt.
max-backoff-seconds	60	Upper bound on the delay between retries.
timeout-minutes	0 (no timeout)	Per-attempt timeout. An attempt that exceeds this is treated as a failure and retried.
shell	bash	Shell to run the command in: bash, sh, pwsh, or cmd.
working-directory	.	Working directory for the command.

Outputs

Output	Description
attempts	Number of attempts actually made.
succeeded	"true" if the command eventually succeeded, "false" otherwise.

How it works

PollyAction runs your command in the chosen shell. On non-zero exit, it waits backoff-seconds, then retries, doubling (or multiplying by backoff-multiplier) the wait each time up to max-backoff-seconds, until max-attempts is reached or the command succeeds.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Also by the same author

Free, MIT-licensed alternatives to commercial dev tools:

Package	Alternative to	Description
FluentPdf	IronPDF, Aspose.PDF	Fluent PDF generation for .NET
AutoBus	MassTransit (paid tiers)	Lightweight in-process/distributed message bus
AutoArchitecture	NetArchTest, ArchUnitNET	Roslyn analyzers enforcing architecture rules
EFCore.BulkOperations	EFCore.BulkExtensions (commercial features)	Bulk insert/update/delete for EF Core
AutoAssert	FluentAssertions (commercial license)	Fluent, MIT-licensed test assertions
PollyAnalyzers	ReSharper resilience inspections	Roslyn analyzers for async/resilience anti-patterns

See github.com/Swevo for the full catalog (60+ packages).