Pause your GitHub Actions workflow and request manual approval from set approvers before continuing
MIT License
Pause a GitHub Actions workflow and require manual approval from one or more approvers before continuing.
This is a very common feature for a deployment or release pipeline, and while this functionality is available from GitHub, it requires the use of environments and if you want to use this for private repositories then you need GitHub Enterprise. This action provides manual approval without the use of environments, and is freely available to use on private repositories.
Note: This approval duration is subject to the broader 72 hours timeout for a workflow. So keep that in mind when figuring out how quickly an approver must respond.
The way this action works is the following:
manual-approval
action.manual-approval
will create an issue in the containing repository and assign it to the approvers
.These are case insensitive with optional punctuation either a period or an exclamation mark.
In all cases, manual-approval
will close the initial GitHub issue.
steps:
- uses: trstringer/manual-approval@v1
with:
secret: ${{ github.TOKEN }}
approvers: user1,user2,org-team1
minimum-approvals: 1
issue-title: "Deploying v1.3.5 to prod from staging"
issue-body: "Please approve or deny the deployment of version v1.3.5."
exclude-workflow-initiator-as-approver: false
additional-approved-words: ''
additional-denied-words: ''
approvers
is a comma-delimited list of all required approvers. An approver can either be a user or an org team. (Note: Required approvers must have the ability to be set as approvers in the repository. If you add an approver that doesn't have this permission then you would receive an HTTP/402 Validation Failed error when running this action)minimum-approvals
is an integer that sets the minimum number of approvals required to progress the workflow. Defaults to ALL approvers.issue-title
is a string that will be appended to the title of the issue.issue-body
is a string that will be prepended to the body of the issue.exclude-workflow-initiator-as-approver
is a boolean that indicates if the workflow initiator (determined by the GITHUB_ACTOR
environment variable) should be filtered from the final list of approvers. This is optional and defaults to false
. Set this to true
to prevent users in the approvers
list from being able to self-approve workflows.additional-approved-words
is a comma separated list of strings to expand the dictionary of words that indicate approval. This is optional and defaults to an empty string.additional-denied-words
is a comma separated list of strings to expand the dictionary of words that indicate denial. This is optional and defaults to an empty string.GitHub has a rich library of emojis, and these all work in additional approved words or denied words. Some values GitHub will store in their text version - i.e. :shipit:
. Other emojis, GitHub will store in their unicode emoji form, like ✅.
For a seamless experience, it is recommended that you add the custom words to a GitHub comment, and then copy it back out of the comment into your actions configuration yaml.
If you want to have approvers
set to an org team, then you need to take a different approach. The default GitHub Actions automatic token does not have the necessary permissions to list out team members. If you would like to use this then you need to generate a token from a GitHub App with the correct set of permissions.
Create a GitHub App with read-only access to organization members. Once the app is created, add a repo secret with the app ID. In the GitHub App settings, generate a private key and add that as a secret in the repo as well. You can get the app token by using the tibdex/github-app-token
GitHub Action:
Note: The GitHub App tokens expire after 1 hour which implies duration for the approval cannot exceed 60 minutes or the job will fail due to bad credentials. See docs.
jobs:
myjob:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Generate token
id: generate_token
uses: tibdex/github-app-token@v1
with:
app_id: ${{ secrets.APP_ID }}
private_key: ${{ secrets.APP_PRIVATE_KEY }}
- name: Wait for approval
uses: trstringer/manual-approval@v1
with:
secret: ${{ steps.generate_token.outputs.token }}
approvers: myteam
minimum-approvals: 1
If you'd like to force a timeout of your workflow pause, you can specify timeout-minutes
at either the step level or the job level.
For instance, if you want your manual approval step to timeout after an hour you could do the following:
steps:
- uses: trstringer/manual-approval@v1
timeout-minutes: 60
...
For the action to create a new issue in your project, please ensure that the action has write permissions on issues. You may have to add the following to your workflow:
permissions:
issues: write
For more information on permissions, please look at the GitHub documentation.
To test out your code in an action, you need to build the image and push it to a different container registry repository. For instance, if I want to test some code I won't build the image with the main image repository. Prior to this, comment out the label binding the image to a repo:
# LABEL org.opencontainers.image.source https://github.com/trstringer/manual-approval
Build the image:
$ VERSION=1.7.1-rc.1 make IMAGE_REPO=ghcr.io/trstringer/manual-approval-test build
Note: The image version can be whatever you want, as this image wouldn't be pushed to production. It is only for testing.
Push the image to your container registry:
$ VERSION=1.7.1-rc.1 make IMAGE_REPO=ghcr.io/trstringer/manual-approval-test push
To test out the image you will need to modify action.yaml
so that it points to your new image that you're testing:
image: docker://ghcr.io/trstringer/manual-approval-test:1.7.0-rc.1
Then to test out the image, run a workflow specifying your dev branch:
- name: Wait for approval
uses: your-github-user/manual-approval@your-dev-branch
with:
secret: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
approvers: trstringer
For uses
, this should point to your repo and dev branch.
Note: To test out the action that uses an approver that is an org team, refer to the org team approver section for instructions.
$ VERSION=1.7.0 make build
$ VERSION=1.7.0 make push
action.yaml
to point to the new image$ git checkout main && git fetch origin && git merge origin main
v1
tag locally and remotely: $ git tag -d v1 && git push --delete origin v1
$ git tag v1.7.0 && git tag v1 && git push origin --tags