pin-github-action

This is a tool that allows you to pin your GitHub actions dependencies to a specific sha without requiring that you update every action manually each time you want to use a newer version of an action.

It achieves this by converting your workflow to use a specific commit hash, whilst adding the original value as a comment on that line. This allows us to resolve newer shas for that target ref automatically in the future.

It converts this:

name: Commit Push
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
jobs:
  build:
    name: nexmo/github-actions/submodule-auto-pr@main
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@main
      - name: nexmo/github-actions/submodule-auto-pr
        uses: nexmo/github-actions/submodule-auto-pr@main

In to this:

name: Commit Push
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
jobs:
  build:
    name: nexmo/github-actions/submodule-auto-pr@main
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@db41740e12847bb616a339b75eb9414e711417df # pin@main
      - name: nexmo/github-actions/submodule-auto-pr
        uses: nexmo/github-actions/submodule-auto-pr@73549280c1c566830040d9a01fe9050dae6a3036 # pin@main

For more information, see How it works.

Installation

npm install -g pin-github-action

Usage

pin-github-action /path/to/.github/workflows/your-name.yml

If you use private actions (or are hitting rate limits), you'll need to provide a GitHub access token:

GH_ADMIN_TOKEN= pin-github-action /path/to/.github/workflows/your-name.yml

Run it as many times as you like! Each time you run the tool the exact sha will be updated to the latest available sha for your pinned ref.

If you're having issues, run with debug logging enabled and open an issue:

DEBUG="pin-github-action*" pin-github-action /path/to/.github/workflows/your-name.yml

You can process multiple files at once by adding additional files as arguments:

pin-github-action first.yml second.yml 

Leaving Actions unpinned

To leave an action unpinned, pass the --allow option when running pin-github-action.

Running pin-github-action /path/to/.github/workflows/your-name.yml --allow "actions/*" will turn this:

jobs:
  build:
    name: nexmo/github-actions/submodule-auto-pr@main
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@main
      - uses: nexmo/github-actions/submodule-auto-pr@main

Into this (notice how actions/checkout@main is ignored):

jobs:
  build:
    name: nexmo/github-actions/submodule-auto-pr@main
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@main
      - name: nexmo/github-actions/submodule-auto-pr
        uses: nexmo/github-actions/submodule-auto-pr@73549280c1c566830040d9a01fe9050dae6a3036 # pin@main

You can pass multiple actions to allow as a comma separated list e.g. actions/checkout,mheap/*

A quick overview of the available globbing patterns (taken from multimatch, which we use to match globs):

• * matches any number of characters, but not /
• ? matches a single character, but not /
• ** matches any number of characters, including /, as long as it's the only thing in a path part
• {} allows for a comma-separated list of "or" expressions
• ! at the beginning of a pattern will negate the match

Examples:

• Exact match: actions/checkout
• Partial match: actions/*
• Negated match: !actions/* (will only pin actions/* actions)

Customising the pin@{ref} comment

You can specify a comment containing the {ref} placeholder to customise the comment added.

To add support for renovate, run with the following options (note the leading space):

pin-github-action -c " {ref}" /path/to/workflow.yaml

How it works

• Load the workflow file provided
• Tokenise it in to an AST
• Extract all uses steps, skipping any docker:// or ./local-path actions
• Loop through all uses steps to determine the target ref
  • If there's a comment in the step, remove pin@ and use that as the target
  • Otherwise, fall back to the ref in the action as the default
• Look up the current sha for each repo on GitHub and update the action to use the specific hash
  • If needed, add a comment with the target pinned version
• Write the workflow file with the new pinned version and original target version as a comment