gh-actions-docs

Automatically generate pretty documentation for your GitHub Actions!

🚀 Features

• Generates pretty documentation including the action name, description, inputs, required permissions and a usage example.
• Supports as many action.yml files as you want, generating documentation for each.
• Extremely fast; in testing, parses eight action.yml files and generates their documentation in ~40 milliseconds.
• Supports the full GitHub Actions schema, including multiline strings.
• Will optionally generate a table of contents for your markdown file.
• Runs Prettier after generating the documentation to ensure a consistent style (can be disabled).
• Very customizable; see inputs section for all available options.

⚡ Quickstart

1. Add the following to your README.md file:

<!-- gh-actions-docs-start path=your/cool/action.yml owner=yourgithubaccount project=cool-action version=v1 -->
<!-- gh-actions-docs-end -->

Edit the path input to point to your action's action.yml file.

Optionally, you can add the owner, project and version inputs to generate the "Usage" section. You can also add the permissions input to generate the "Permissions" section.

2. Use the gh-actions-docs action in your workflow:

generate-docs:
  name: Generate documentation
  runs-on: ubuntu-latest
  permissions:
    contents: write
  steps:
    - name: Checkout repository
      uses: actions/checkout@v4

    - name: Generate documentation
      uses: 3lvia/gh-actions-docs@v1

    - name: Commit changes
      run: |
        if [[ -z "$(git status --porcelain)" ]]; then
          echo "No changes to commit"
          exit 0
        fi

        git config user.name github-actions
        git config user.email [email protected]

        git add README.md
        git commit -m "Update action documentation"
        git push

📝 Examples of Generated Documentation

• https://github.com/3lvia/core-github-actions-templates/blob/trunk/README.md
• This section of the README.md and onwards.

✍️ Getting Started

gh-actions-docs can be used as an executable or as a GitHub Action. The generated documentation will be added to the file README.md by default. To specify where in the file the documentation should be added, add the following two comments to your README file:

<!-- gh-actions-docs-start path=your/cool/action.yml owner=3lvia project=cool-action version=v3 permissions=contents:read,issues:write -->
<!-- gh-actions-docs-end -->

Documentation will then be generated between these two comments. You can add multiple comments to generate documentation for multiple actions.

Only the path parameter is required, and the owner, project, version and permissions parameters are optional.

The parameters owner, project and version are used to generate the "Usage" section. If any of these parameters are missing, the "Usage" section will not be generated.

The permissions parameter is used to generate the "Permissions" section. If this parameter is missing, the "Permissions" section will not be generated.

Generate a table of contents

gh-actions-docs can also generate a table of contents for your README file. Add the following two comments to your README file to generate a table of contents:

<!-- gh-actions-docs-toc-start -->
<!-- gh-actions-docs-toc-end -->

GitHub Action

gh-actions-docs is primarily intended to be used as a GitHub Action. The below documentation is actually generated from the action.yml file in this repository (with name, description and table of contents disabled).

Inputs

Name	Description	Required	Default
debug	Set to true to enable debug output.	no	false
ignore-files	Comma-separated list of actions.yml-files to ignore when generating action documentation.	no
ignore-headers	Comma-separated list of headers to ignore when generating a table of contents. Should include the #-prefixes, e.g. ## My Header or ### My Other Header.	no
no-actions	Set to true to disable generation of any actions documentation. Useful when you only want to generate a table of contents. This cannot be set to true if no-toc is also set to true.	no	false
no-description	Set to true to disable generation of action descriptions.	no	false
no-inputs	Set to true to disable generation of action inputs.	no	false
no-name	Set to true to disable generation of action names.	no	false
no-outputs	Set to true to disable generation of action outputs.	no	false
no-permissions	Set to true to disable generation of action permissions.	no	false
no-toc	Set to true to disable generation of a table of contents. Useful when you only want to generate actions documentation. This cannot be set to true if no-actions is also set to true.	no	false
no-usage	Set to true to disable generation of usage examples.	no	false
readme-file	The file to read the action tags from and write the documentation to.	no	README.md
run-prettier	Set to true to run Prettier on the generated documentation.	no	false

Usage

- name: gh-actions-docs
  uses: 3lvia/gh-actions-docs@v1
  with:
    debug:
    # Set to `true` to enable debug output.
    #
    # Required: no
    # Default: 'false'

    ignore-files:
    # Comma-separated list of `actions.yml`-files to ignore when generating action documentation.
    #
    # Required: no

    ignore-headers:
    # Comma-separated list of headers to ignore when generating a table of contents. Should include the `#`-prefixes, e.g. `## My Header` or `### My Other Header`.
    #
    # Required: no

    no-actions:
    # Set to `true` to disable generation of any actions documentation. Useful when you only want to generate a table of contents. This cannot be set to `true` if `no-toc` is also set to `true`.
    #
    # Required: no
    # Default: 'false'

    no-description:
    # Set to `true` to disable generation of action descriptions.
    #
    # Required: no
    # Default: 'false'

    no-inputs:
    # Set to `true` to disable generation of action inputs.
    #
    # Required: no
    # Default: 'false'

    no-name:
    # Set to `true` to disable generation of action names.
    #
    # Required: no
    # Default: 'false'

    no-outputs:
    # Set to `true` to disable generation of action outputs.
    #
    # Required: no
    # Default: 'false'

    no-permissions:
    # Set to `true` to disable generation of action permissions.
    #
    # Required: no
    # Default: 'false'

    no-toc:
    # Set to `true` to disable generation of a table of contents. Useful when you only want to generate actions documentation. This cannot be set to `true` if `no-actions` is also set to `true`.
    #
    # Required: no
    # Default: 'false'

    no-usage:
    # Set to `true` to disable generation of usage examples.
    #
    # Required: no
    # Default: 'false'

    readme-file:
    # The file to read the action tags from and write the documentation to.
    #
    # Required: no
    # Default: 'README.md'

    run-prettier:
    # Set to `true` to run Prettier on the generated documentation.
    #
    # Required: no
    # Default: 'false'

Docker

You can run gh-actions-docs using locally using Docker:

docker run -v "$(pwd):/opt/app" ghcr.io/3lvia/core/gh-actions-docs:latest

Local

You can also run gh-actions-docs locally using Cabal. Install GHCUp, which should include Cabal, and then run:

cabal update
cabal install --overwrite-policy=always
gh-actions-docs

Environment variables (Docker or local)

See inputs above or action.yml for all available environment variables when running using Docker or locally with Cabal. The environment variables use all-caps snake-case, e.g. IGNORE_FILES instead of ignore-files.

🧑‍💻 Development

Releasing a new version

To release a new version, update the version tag in both action.yml and gh-actions-docs.cabal. A new git tag and GitHub release should then be generated when pushing the changes to trunk.