HN Explorer

Show HN: ActionsPanel – Manually Trigger Your GitHub Actions

57 points by abatilo ↗ HN
Hi all!

I wanted to share a small project that I've been working on with a buddy.

https://www.actionspanel.app/

One of the problems that currently exists with GitHub Actions is the fact that there is no way to easily trigger your Actions unless you cause some kind of GitHub event. This could be pushing a new commit, or creating an issue on a repository. But if you just want to run an arbitrary action, there's not currently a good way to do that.

This is a well known feature request: https://github.community/t5/GitHub-Actions/GitHub-Actions-Ma...

GitHub somewhat recently added an API for `repository_dispatch` which is an available trigger for a GitHub Action. There are many blog posts that explain how you can create a Personal Access Token to send your own `repository_dispatch` via some curl command or postman request.

For example: https://goobar.io/2019/12/07/manually-trigger-a-github-actio...

ActionsPanel uses this same API but does so with a GitHub App token so that you don't need to worry about managing your own PAT. This also makes it much easier to trigger your actions across teams with multiple people. Then you don't need to share the PAT with each other or each create your own PATs.

You configure your buttons with a declarative yaml file that you leave in the repo, and ActionsPanel will read that file and dynamically create your UI for you to trigger your actions.

We'd love to get your feedback on this project. It's very simple still but solves the core problem of triggering your actions.

If you do have feedback or any questions, feel free to post in this thread, or email us directly at support (at) actionspanel (dot) app

Looking forward to your feedback!

23 comments

[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 72.3 ms ] thread
csullivan84
I'm one of the creators of ActionsPanel. As an early adopter of GitHub Actions, this was an obvious feature gap that made it harder to switch off of other CI/CD systems (Jenkins, Circle, etc).

It's been great having a centralized place for all of our code and deployment related activities. The GitHub Actions ecosystem is maturing quickly and we'd like to help with that momentum.

--Charles

thecodrr
Hey, very amazing tool. It was one of the features I missed the most. Thanks a lot!
warmuuh
you can also use https://greasyfork.org/de/scripts/394032-github-deployments-... which adds a button for repository_dispatch event directly in your repository, no need to visit a 3party page.
warmuuh
on the same note: it would be nice if you could add buttons to a readme.md which trigger the actions, maybe via https://www.actionspanel.app/, but also the buttons then are in the repo?
abatilo
We've thought about this feature actually. What we haven't quite figured out is how to deal with the authentication of making sure that someone SHOULD be able to run the action.

That being said, on the website, we do give you a markdown snippet to add to your README to make it easy to navigate to the correct page of your repo in ActionsPanel

abatilo
That's a really cool idea that I never thought of.

One of my concerns would be that now you need every developer on your team to install this to their browser, but if you're working alone, this could absolutely be an easy solution!

riquito
I saw it working with teams too, it becomes part of the onboarding, and as soon as you have one feature used everyday nobody forgets (or anyway everyone else will remind you soon enough).
eMerzh
Nice I was looking to test this at work... But not sure if login does not work for me (and my buddy) or something else.... But we kept beeing redirected to the login button
csullivan84
Sorry about that. It seem like we have a small bug in our redirection logic for new logins. If you hard refresh the page after you've logged in with GitHub it should work.

We'll get this corrected shortly. Thank you for the feedback.

eMerzh
hum, still stuck at https://www.actionspanel.app/auth/sign-in?next=/app ... trying to go to /app but redirect there again... clicking the button "does nothing" (goes to github and back in a glimpse).
csullivan84
Just pushed a fix to the login flow. Let me know if you're still having issues.

Thanks!

abatilo
We've fixed at least two different bugs that have caused this problem since posting to HN. Please let us know if you're still seeing it. It's been a hard one to reproduce!
soylentgraham
My biggest problem is having to commit to test changes whilst I'm writing/debugging an action, can this help with that? And if not, does anyone have a good solution for testing an action before committing? If it helps im already using self hosted runners.