Tag List Action

This GitHub action prints a table of tags associated with your repository ordered chronologically from newest to oldest. It also highlights those tags which were created as a part of the current pull request.

Parameters

Parameter	Default	Required
owner	context.repo.owner	No
repo	context.payload.repository?.name	No

Additional values can be set as part of a local run, or defined in the environment.

Parameter	Value to Set
pr_number	context.payload.number
token	process.env.GITHUB_TOKEN

Running Locally

To run this GitHub actions locally first install act (https://nektosact.com/installation/homebrew.html).

act has several methods for simulating the GitHub context used by the Action.

For the github.event values, you have to create an event.json file at the root of the project and put your event values in there. You only really need the values that are being accessed, though. It does not need to be schema complete.

{
  "pull_request": {
      "head": {
        "ref": "test-pr"
      },
      "base": {
        "ref": "main"
      }
  },
  "repository": {
    "name": "tag-list-action"
  },
  "number": 1
}

Then you have secrets like secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN. For those create a .secrets file (after adding that to your .gitignore file) and enter the values the same way you would for a normal .env file, as key/value pairs.

GITHUB_TOKEN=<secret_value>
GITHUB_API_URL:https://api.github.com
GITHUB_BASE_REF:main
GITHUB_EVENT_NAME:pull_request
GITHUB_EVENT_PATH:/var/run/act/workflow/event.json
GITHUB_GRAPHQL_URL:https://api.github.com/graphql
...

Setting the GitHub context is one of the more poorly documented parts of this process. There are several files which act uses to define the GitHub context. They are: .env, .input, .secrets, .vars and event.json, each with their own flag. If you run act with the --verbose flag you can see how values from these files are parsed by act and used inside the action.

What the act documentation does not mention is how these environment variables are set. Some environment variables cannot be overridden. Other environment variables are derivatives of other environment variables. So in particular if you wanted to override the github.repository_owner value in the context, you cannot do so directly. By default act uses the local git repo URL to set the GITHUB_REPOSITORY variable and from that derives the value for the GITHUB_REPOSITORY_OWNER variable, meaning you cannot directly set GITHUB_REPOSITORY_OWNER in your dotfiles.

So your final command will look something like this:

# Use NCC to build your package
npx ncc build index.js -o dist

# Run act
act -j 'annotate-pr' --container-architecture linux/amd64 --bind --secret-file .secrets --eventpath event.json --verbose

# Explanations
-j 'step-name' # -j specifies a step to run.  If you want to run the whole workflow you can remove this

--container-architecture <architecture> # What kind of Docker image to use

--bind # This was necessary to allow the container to access your dotfiles

--secret-file .secrets # Specify the name of your secrets file (defaults to .secrets)

--eventpath .event.json # Specify the name of your event file

--env-file .env # Specify the name of your environment file (defaults to .env)

--verbose # Debug logging

The syntax for the GitHub context within the JavaScript environment looks something like this:

const Context = {
    payload: {
          pull_request: {
              head: { ref: 'first-commit' },
              base: { ref: 'main' }
          },
          repository: { name: 'component-version-annotation' },
          number: 1
    },
    eventName: 'push',
    sha: '3339c89b34eebb48d2cf13a0f5ee114515ea6d61',
    ref: 'refs/heads/main',
    workflow: 'Commit Message Summaries',
    action: '0',
    actor: 'nektos/act',
    job: 'annotate-pr-local',
    runNumber: 1,
    runId: 1,
    apiUrl: 'https://api.github.com',
    serverUrl: 'https://github.com',
    graphqlUrl: 'https://api.github.com/graphql',
    repo: {
        owner: 'ower_name',
        repo: 'tag-list-action'
    }
}

Note: There may be additional properties based on what properties you populate in your event.json file.