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Allow "injection" of steps to reusable workflows #2079
Description
Describe the enhancement
Reusable workflows are a great enhancement, but still limited e.g. compared to Azure DevOps templates. It would be great if we have some way to inject steps into a reusable workflow.
Possible implementations:
- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/process/templates?view=azure-devops#use-templatecontext-to-pass-properties-to-templates
- Allow
stepskeyword when using a reusable workflow and add another mandatory property likerun-before: {id}/run-after: {id}to thestepscontext. The{id}specifies the id of the step inside the reusable workflow. - Allow deserialization of individual steps using
- ${{ fromJson(...) }}. This could be used inside a reusable workflow to dynamically insert a step based on e.g. an input argument.
Additional information
I implemented a reusable generic .NET test workflow. Sadly some of the tests require a SQL database to run, others a Redis server, and so on. We now have the option to either add a bunch of conditional dependency setup steps to the reusable action (which effectively destroys the generic aspect) or to stop using the reusable action at all.
Reacted by Gabriel Féo, Walter Scott Johnson, Nima Dini, Jordan Breen, Janos Feher, Ezbon Jacob, Chase Wagoner, Alex, Samuele Pecetto, Chun-Wei Chang and 8 more
Activity
nikola-jokic commentedon Aug 31, 2022
Hey @flobernd,
Thank you for submitting this enhancement! It has been added to the board and considered in future enhancements☺️
casanova-21 commentedon Mar 16, 2023
@nikola-jokic Hey! 👋 Can you give us an update on this one and whether or not it's made it onto your backlog or roadmap for this year? LinkedIn is asking about it.
benwells commentedon Mar 17, 2023
Hey all! Nikola brought this to my attention and I reached out to the Product Manager who owns reusable workflows (this feature is owned by a different team than the one @nikola-jokic and I are a part of). The response was:
I would recommend redirecting this feedback to the GitHub Community Support Forum, which would be a more appropriate place to get the attention of the proper teams for this feature request.
flobernd commentedon Mar 17, 2023
Thanks for the update. Posting in community forums on the other hand is like sending the message directly to /dev/null. None of my topics even got a single response yet... and I don't event blame you guys for not being able to properly monitor it. Just too much stuff, but pretty much pointless to post there any feature request.
asottile commentedon Sep 5, 2023
for my use case I was able to make this work via a reusable local action
https://github.com/asottile/workflows/blob/v1.5.0/.github/workflows/tox.yml#L60
this checks for existence of the plugin point and then executes the action
you can see an example usage in https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit
janosh commentedon Feb 19, 2025
is this being tracked anywhere? i wasn't able to find a request for this feature in https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions. seconding @flobernd's sentiment, maybe worth transfering this issue to the right issue tracker instead of closing