A GitHub Action to enable branch deployments using IssueOps!

This Action does the heavy lifting for you to enable branch deployments:

• 🔍 Detects when IssueOps commands are used on a pull request
• ✏️ Configurable - Choose your command syntax, environment, noop trigger, base branch, reaction, and more
• ✔️ Respects your branch protection settings configured for the repo
• 🗨️ Comments and reacts to your IssueOps commands
• 🚀 Triggers GitHub deployments for you with simple configuration
• 🔓 Deploy locks to prevent multiple deployments from clashing

• .deploy - Deploy a pull request
• .noop - Deploy a pull request in noop mode. Noop deployments do not require a PR review or approval
• .deploy to <environment> - Deploy a pull request to a specific environment
• .deploy <stable_branch> - Trigger a rollback deploy to your stable branch (main, master, etc)
• .lock - Create a deployment lock for the default environment
• .lock --reason <text> - Create a deployment lock for the default environment with a custom reason
• .lock --details - View details about a deployment lock
• .lock <environment> - Create a deployment lock for a specific environment
• .lock --global - Create a global deployment lock
• .unlock - Remove a deployment lock
• .unlock <environment> - Remove a deployment lock for a specific environment
• .unlock --global - Remove a global deployment lock
• .help - Get help with IssueOps commands with this Action

These commands are all fully customizable and are just an example using this Action's defaults

For the full command usage, check out the usage document

Alternate command syntax and shortcuts can be found at the bottom of this readme here

A video demo showing how IssueOps on a pull request works using this Action

A quick section to get you started with this Action

Basic usage assuming all defaults:

- name: branch-deploy
  id: branch-deploy
  uses: github/[email protected]

Advanced usage with custom configuration:

- name: branch-deploy
  id: branch-deploy
  uses: github/[email protected]
  with:
    trigger: ".deploy"
    noop_trigger: ".noop"
    reaction: "eyes"
    environment: "production"
    stable_branch: "main"

Check out a super simple workflow example using this Action to quickly get up and running with branch deployments

name: "branch deploy demo"

# The workflow to execute on is comments that are newly created
on:
  issue_comment:
    types: [created]

# Permissions needed for reacting and adding comments for IssueOps commands
permissions:
  pull-requests: write
  deployments: write
  contents: write
  checks: read
  statuses: read

jobs:
  demo:
    if: ${{ github.event.issue.pull_request }} # only run on pull request comments
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # Execute IssueOps branch deployment logic, hooray!
      # This will be used to "gate" all future steps below and conditionally trigger steps/deployments
      - uses: github/[email protected]
        id: branch-deploy
        with:
          trigger: ".deploy"

      # Run your deployment logic for your project here - examples seen below

      # Checkout your project's repository based on the commit SHA provided by the branch-deploy step
      # It is important to only ever operate on the commit SHA (where possible) as commit SHA's are immutable and you know exactly what you are deploying
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          ref: ${{ steps.branch-deploy.outputs.sha }}

      # Do some fake "noop" deployment logic here
      # conditionally run a noop deployment
      - name: fake noop deploy
        if: ${{ steps.branch-deploy.outputs.continue == 'true' && steps.branch-deploy.outputs.noop == 'true' }}
        run: echo "I am doing a fake noop deploy"

      # Do some fake "regular" deployment logic here
      # conditionally run a regular deployment
      - name: fake regular deploy
        if: ${{ steps.branch-deploy.outputs.continue == 'true' && steps.branch-deploy.outputs.noop != 'true' }}
        run: echo "I am doing a fake regular deploy"

Keep reading to learn more about this Action! Even further details about how this Action works can be found below as well

You can check out further examples by checking out our examples documentation

Before we get into details, let's first define a few key terms below:

• IssueOps - Its like ChatOps but instead of using a chat bot, commands are invoked by commenting on a pull request (PRs are issues under the hood) - Example: commenting .deploy on a pull request
• Branch Deployment - A branch deploy is a deployment methodology that enables you to deploy a branch (or pull request) to a desired environment before merging to main or master - More on this below
• PR - Short for pull request

The best way to define IssueOps is to compare it to something similar, ChatOps. You may be familiar with the concept ChatOps already but in case you aren't here is a quick definition below:

ChatOps is the process of interacting with a chat bot to execute commands directly in a chat platform. For example, with ChatOps you might do something like .ping example.org to check the status of a website

IssueOps adopts the same mindset but through a different medium. Rather than using a chat service to invoke the commands we use comments on a GitHub Issue or Pull Request. GitHub Actions is the runtime which executes our desired logic

Branch deployments are a battle tested way of deploying your changes to a given environment for a variety of reasons. Branch deployments allow you to do the following:

• Deploy your changes to production before merging
• Deploy changes to a staging, QA, or non-production environment

Note: The main branch is considered the base repository branch for all examples below

• The main branch is always considered to be a stable and deployable branch
• All changes are deployed to production before they are merged to the main branch
• To roll back a branch deployment, you deploy the main branch
• noop deployments should not make changes but rather report what they "would" have done and do not require approval or review before starting

To put the merge -> deploy model in the past!

What if your changes are bad and you broke production with the merge -> deploy model? Well now you have to revert your PR, get passing CI/builds, and then re-merge your changes to get back to a stable environment. With the branch deploy model, this is almost never the case. The main branch is considered to be always safe and stable

This section will go into detail about how this Action works and hopefully inspire you on ways you can leverage it in your own projects

Let's walk through a GitHub Action workflow using this Action line by line:

# The name of the workflow, it can be anything you wish
name: "branch deploy demo"

# The workflow to execute on is comments that are newly created
on:
  issue_comment:
    types: [created]

It is important to note that the workflow we want to run IssueOps on is issue_comment and created. This means we will not run under any other contexts for this workflow. You can edit this as you wish but it does change how this model ultimately works. For example, issue_comment workflows only use files found on main to run. If you do something like on: pull_request you could open yourself up to issues as a user could alter a file in a PR and exfil your secrets for example. Only using issue_comment is the suggested workflow type

# Permissions needed for reacting and adding comments for IssueOps commands
permissions:
  pull-requests: write # Required for commenting on PRs
  deployments: write # Required for updating deployment statuses
  contents: write # Required for reading/writing the lock file
  checks: read # Required for checking if the CI checks have passed in order to deploy the PR
  statuses: read # Required for checking if all commit statuses are "success" in order to deploy the PR

These are the minimum permissions you need to run this Action. If you need further assistance with permissions within GitHub Actions, please review the following documentation.

jobs:
  demo:
    if: ${{ github.event.issue.pull_request }} # only run on pull request comments
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # Checkout your projects repository
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

Sets up your demo job, uses an ubuntu runner, and checks out your repo - Just some standard setup for a general Action. We also add an if: statement here to only run this workflow on pull request comments to make it a little cleaner

Note: The Action will check the context for us anyways but this can save us a bit of CI time by using the if: condition

      # Execute IssueOps branch deployment logic, hooray!
      - uses: github/[email protected]
        id: branch-deploy
        with:
          trigger: ".deploy"

Note: It is important to set an id: for this job so we can reference its outputs in subsequent steps

The core of this Action takes place here. This block of code will trigger the branch deploy action to run. It will do the following:

1. Check the comment which invoked the workflow for the trigger: phrase (.deploy) defined here
2. If the trigger phrase is found, it will proceed with a deployment
3. It will start by reacting to your message to let you know it is running
4. The Action will post a comment with a link to the running Actions workflow for you to follow its progress
5. A deployment will be started and attached to your pull request - You'll get a nice little yellow rocket which tells you a deployment is in progress
6. Outputs will be exported by this job for later reference in other jobs as well

      # Do some fake "noop" deployment logic here
      # conditionally run a noop deployment
      - name: fake noop deploy
        if: ${{ steps.branch-deploy.outputs.continue == 'true' && steps.branch-deploy.outputs.noop == 'true' }}
        run: echo "I am doing a fake noop deploy"

      # Do some fake "regular" deployment logic here
      # conditionally run a regular deployment
      - name: fake regular deploy
        if: ${{ steps.branch-deploy.outputs.continue == 'true' && steps.branch-deploy.outputs.noop != 'true' }}
        run: echo "I am doing a fake regular deploy"

As seen above, we have two steps. One for a noop deploy, and one for a regular deploy. For example, the noop deploy could trigger a terraform plan and the regular deploy could be a terraform apply. These steps are conditionally gated by two variables:

• steps.branch-deploy.outputs.continue == 'true' - The continue variable is only set to true when a deployment should continue
• steps.branch-deploy.outputs.noop == 'true' - The noop variable is only set to true when a noop deployment should be run

Example: You comment .noop on a pull request. A noop deployment is detected so this action outputs the noop variable to true. You also have the correct permissions to execute the IssueOps command so the action also outputs the continue variable to true. This will allow the "fake noop deploy" step seen above to run and the "fake regular deploy" step will be skipped

For documentation on how to customize the deployment messages, see the custom deployment messages docs.

If you are using environment rather than repo secrets, this section will be of interest to you

For those familiar with GitHub Actions, you have probably used environments before to store secrets and trigger deployments. The syntax for doing so is very simple and usually looks like this:

jobs:
  deploy:
    environment: production # right here we use an environment
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: deployment
        run: terraform apply -auto-approve

However, this has a few limitations:

• When workflows finish, so does the deployment to that environment - This means that the little green rocket doesn't "stick" to your pull request
• It is tricky to tune in environment protection rules with a single environment when using IssueOps + branch-deployments

To get around these limitations with this branch-deploy action and IssueOps, we can use two different environments. One to store our environnement secrets and another to use in our branch deployments.

Yes this isn't the most elegant solution, but it works and is very easy to accomplish

Here is a proper example for using two environments with this action:

jobs:
  deploy:
    if: ${{ github.event.issue.pull_request }} # only run on pull request comments
    environment: production-secrets # custom environment for storing secrets
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: github/[email protected]
        id: branch-deploy
        with:
          trigger: ".deploy"
          environment: production # the environment for the actual deployment

      # Your deployment steps go here...

This allows you to achieve the following:

• Fine grained control over your environment secrets in the production-secrets environment
• A "sticky" green rocket to your PR that doesn't disappear when the workflow finishes
• Access to all the environment secrets stored in the production-secrets environment

With this Action, you can also choose the environment you wish to deploy to. This is useful if you have multiple environments and want to deploy to a specific environment.

This can be achieved with the environment_targets input

With this option, you can specify a comma separated list of environments that you can deploy to besides just the default with .deploy

The defaults that are used are: production,development,staging. However, you can configure this to be whatever you like!

To use a deployment with a specific environment, you would invoke your commands like so:

• .deploy production
• .deploy to production
• .deploy to <environment>

This also works with noop commands as well

• .noop production
• .noop to production
• .noop to <environment>

YAML input example:

- uses: github/[email protected]
  id: branch-deploy
  with:
    trigger: ".deploy"
    environment: production # the default environment
    environment_targets: "production,development,staging" # the environments that you can deploy to with explicit commands

You can view additional details about the environment_targets input option in the action.yml section above

Environment URLs can be configured and mapped to matching environment_targets using the environment_urls input.

This input option is a mapping of environment names to URLs and the environment names must match the environment_targets input option. This option is a comma separated list with pipes (|) separating the environment from the URL.

Note: disabled is a special keyword to disable an environment url if you enable this option but not all environments have a url.

Format: "<environment1>|<url1>,<environment2>|<url2>,etc"

Example: "production|https://myapp.com,development|https://dev.myapp.com,staging|disabled"

This option is especially useful when your deployment targets are services with a URL (website, API, etc)

By enabling this option, you will get a "clickable" link on success (non-noop) deployment messages on pull requests. You will also be able to click the "View deployment" button in your repository's deployments page and be taken to the URL of the environment you deployed to.

If you wish to disable the "clickable" link on the successful deployment message, you can set the environment_url_in_comment input to "false".

This Action supports rollback deployments out of the box. This is useful when you run a branch deployment (.deploy) and something goes wrong and you need to rollback to a previous known working state.

This can be achieved by using the .deploy <stable_branch> command

See the inputs section above for more information on how to configure the stable branch

The <stable_branch> can be any branch you like but it is highly recommended that you use a branch that is protected and only has stable code in it. An example would be using main or master as your stable branch and enforcing strict branch protection rules on it to ensure that only stable code is merged into it

The IssueOps + branch-deploy model is significantly more secure than a traditional "deploy on merge" or "run on commit" model. Let's reference the workflow trigger that the branch-deploy model uses:

on:
  issue_comment:
    types: [created]

Unlike the on: pull_request trigger, the on: issue_comment trigger only uses Actions workflow files from the default branch in GitHub. This means that a bad actor cannot open a PR with a malicious workflow edit and dump secrets, trigger bad deployments, or cause other issues. This means that any changes to the workflow files can be protected with branch protection rules to ensure only verified changes make it into your default branch.

To further harden your workflow files, it is strongly suggested to include the base permissions that this Action needs to run:

permissions:
  pull-requests: write
  deployments: write
  contents: write
  checks: read
  statuses: read

Permissions Explained:

• pull-requests: write - Required to add comments to pull requests with deployment results
• deployments: write - Required to update repository deployment statuses
• contents: write - Write access is required for this Action to create "lock" branches for deployments
• checks: read - Only read access is needed for this Action to get the status of other CI checks
• statuses: read - Only read access is needed for this Action to get the commit statuses of commits in the PR

It should also be noted that this Action has built in functions to check the permissions of a user who invokes a IssueOps command. If the user does not have write or greater permissions to the repository, their command will be rejected (via the default settings)

Here are some additional security best practices to consider:

• Set the allow_forks input option to "false" to completely prevent deployments to forks if you do not require them for your project.
• Set the commit_verification input option to "true" to enforce commit verification before a deployment can continue. This is an excellent way to enforce tighter security controls on your deployments. If a deployment is requested on a commit that does not have a verified signature, the deployment will be rejected.
• Ensure that your branch protection settings require that PRs have approvals before. This prevents users from deploying changes that have not been reviewed.
• Ensure that your branch protection settings require that PRs have some CI checks defined, and that those CI checks are required. This ensure that the code being deployed has passing CI checks.

This Action supports a configurable input called admins which can be used to specify a list of individual GitHub users or teams that should have elevated permissions when using this Action

The admins input option takes a comma separated list of GitHub handles or GitHub org teams which can bypass branch protection rules related to approvals for deployments. For example, if you give the option admins: monalisa, the monalisa user will be able to deploy without needing approval on their pull requests. CI checks will still need to pass however.

It should be noted that if you do not have pull request approvals enabled in your branch protection rules, then this option will not make a difference either way

Here is a simple example using only handles below (the monalisa and octocat users will be treated as admins):

- uses: github/[email protected]
  id: branch-deploy
  with:
    admins: monalisa,octocat

Here is an example using a mix of GitHub handles and a GitHub org team below:

- uses: github/[email protected]
  id: branch-deploy
  with:
    admins: monalisa,octocat,octo-awesome-org/octo-awesome-team
    admins_pat: ${{ secrets.BRANCH_DEPLOY_ADMINS_PAT }}

In this case, all users (and future users) in the octo-awesome-org/octo-awesome-team team will be treated as admins in addition to the monalisa and octocat users

It should be noted if you choose to use GitHub org teams for admin definitions, you will need a GitHub Personal Access Token with the read:org scope. This is because the Action will need to make API calls on behalf of an authenticated user in the org to retrieve team memberships. If you choose to only use GitHub handles for admin definitions, then the admins_pat input is not required

Note: You can read more about the admin option under the inputs section in this readme

In order to ensure your usage of this action is stable, it is highly recommended that you use either pin your action to a SHA or use a specific release tag

You can easily select the exact version you want on the GitHub Actions marketplace seen in the screenshot below:

You can also pin to an exact commit SHA as well using a third party tool such as mheap/pin-github-action

GitHub Actions security hardening and stability docs available here: docs

For full details about how this Action handles deployment locks and concurrency, please see the deployment locks and concurrency documentation

This linked document also contains usage, setup details, and examples

Checkout the merge commit workflow strategy for more information on how to use this Action with a merge commit workflow strategy.

If you need more fine tuned control over when the deployment status is set to success you can use the skip_completing option to prevent this Action from setting your deployment status to success after it completes.

When using this option, you will need to manually set your deployment status depending on if you deployment succeeds or fails.

An example workflow using this option can be found here

If you are looking to save on Actions compute time, here is a helpful tip! You can use the if conditional to only run this Action when a specific comment is made on a pull request. This can help you save on Actions compute time by only running this Action when it should truly be invoked.

Here is an example workflow demonstrating the if conditional:

name: "branch deploy demo"

# The workflow to execute on is comments that are newly created
on:
  issue_comment:
    types: [created]

# Permissions needed for reacting and adding comments for IssueOps commands
permissions:
  pull-requests: write
  deployments: write
  contents: write
  checks: read
  statuses: read

jobs:
  demo:
    if: # only run on pull request comments and very specific comment body string as defined in our branch-deploy settings - this will save on Actions compute time
      ${{ github.event.issue.pull_request &&
      (startsWith(github.event.comment.body, '.deploy') ||
      startsWith(github.event.comment.body, '.noop') ||
      startsWith(github.event.comment.body, '.lock') ||
      startsWith(github.event.comment.body, '.help') ||
      startsWith(github.event.comment.body, '.wcid') ||
      startsWith(github.event.comment.body, '.unlock')) }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: github/[email protected] # replace with the latest version
        id: branch-deploy
        with:
          trigger: ".deploy"
          noop_trigger: ".noop"
          lock_trigger: ".lock"
          unlock_trigger: ".unlock"
          help_trigger: ".help"
          lock_info_alias: ".wcid"
          # these are all the command definitions that we want to listen for (above) ^

      # Run your deployment logic for your project below...

This section contains real world examples of how this Action can be used

• Terraform
• Heroku
• Railway
• SSH
• Cloudflare Pages
• Cloudflare Workers
• Hugo
• Astro
• Multiple Jobs (advanced)

Checkout the examples document for more examples

Remember, these are just examples and you can quite literally configure this Action for any deployment target you want!

What to see live examples of this Action in use?

Check out some of the links below to see how others are using this Action in their projects:

• github/entitlements-config
• the-hideout/cloudflare
• the-hideout/tarkov-api
• the-hideout/stash
• GrantBirki/blog

Are you using this Action in a cool new way? Open a pull request to this repo to have your workflow added to the list above!

This section will cover a few suggestions and best practices that will help you when using this Action.

1. Suggest Updating Pull Request Branches - You should absolutely use this option when using the branch-deploy Action. This option can be found in your repository's /settings page
2. Enable Branch Protection Settings - It is always a good idea to enable branch protection settings for your repo, especially when using this Action
   1. Require Pull Request Reviews - Enforce that pull requests have approvals, code owner approvals, and dismiss stale pull request approvals upon new commits
   2. Add Required Status Checks - Enforce that certain CI checks must pass before a pull request can be merged
3. If you don't need to deploy PR forks (perhaps your project is internal and not open source), you can set the allow_forks input to "false" to prevent deployments from running on forks.
4. You should always (unless you have a certain restriction) use the sha output variable over the ref output variable when deploying. It is more reliable for deployments, and safer from a security perspective. More details about using commit SHAs for deployments can be found here.

Here are a few alternate ways you can invoke commands:

• .noop staging - Invoke a "noop" deployment to the staging environment
• .deploy development - Invoke a deployment to the development environment (notice how you can omit the "to" keyword)
• .deploy to development - Invoke a deployment to the development environment (with the "to" keyword)
• .deploy - Uses the default environment (usually "production")
• .wcid - Alias for .lock --details meaning "where can I deploy?"

Check out the usage guide for more information

All contributions are welcome from all!

Check out the contributing guide to learn more

If you are a maintainer of this Action, please see the maintainer guide for more information