How to reuse Actions from another private repo using GitHub Actions

With GitHub, it’s easy to create Actions and use them in GitHub Workflow as long as they are accessible from a public repository. This blog post shows you how to use Actions from a private repository.

The problem

Reusing Workflows is working out of the box with GitHub Actions. But using Actions from private repositories is not possible. When you want to use an Action in a private Repo you can do the following:

The solution

We are making use of the Action described in the previous blogpost. We are going to use the Action described there and add another. We are going to make use of the following 2 Actions:

tibdex/github-app-token to get a token

actions/checkout. To check out the private repo using the token. Make sure to configure a path. Otherwise, you are checking out the other repo and removing sources of the current repo.

Prerequisites

• You need a GitHub App configured like described in the previous blogpost.
• Also, add the needed secrets to this repository. (Preferably by Organizational secrets)
  In this example the secrets TECHDRIVEN_APP_CLIENTID and TECHDRIVEN_APP_SECRET

The working example

Create a workflow like this:

name: Use Private Action Workflow 
 
on: 
  workflow_dispatch: 
 
permissions: 
  id-token: write 
  contents: read 
  pull-requests: write 
 
jobs: 
  demo:     
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest    
    environment: dev 
    steps: 
     
    - name: Checkout 
      uses: actions/checkout@v3 
 
    - name: "Get Application Token" 
      id: get_app_token 
      uses: tibdex/github-app-token@v1 
      with: 
        app_id: ${{ secrets.TECHDRIVEN_APP_CLIENTID }} 
        private_key: ${{ secrets.TECHDRIVEN_APP_SECRET }} 
 
    - name: Checkout Actions 
      uses: actions/checkout@v3 
      with: 
        repository: techdrivennl/blogpost-actions-central 
        token: ${{ steps.get_app_token.outputs.token }} 
        path: blogpost-actions-central 
        ref: main    
 
    # Here we use the private Action 
    - name: Echo              
      uses: ./blogpost-actions-central/.github/actions/echo 
      with:                  
        text: "Hello World!"

We are using the Action in the other private repo that looks like this:

name: "Echo some text"
description: "Really important Action so we can echo some text"
inputs:
  text: 
    description: 'text to echo'
    required: true

runs:
  using: "composite"
  steps:
    - name: Echo
      id: echo      
      shell: bash
      run: |        
        echo ${{ inputs.text }}

Conclusion

Since we are able to use a GitHub app in the previous blog post, we can use it to access anything in a private repo. Also Private Actions.

The source can be found in the following 2 repositories: (which are both public, but otherwise, you would not be able to see the workings :-))
https://github.com/techdrivennl/blogpost-actions-project
https://github.com/techdrivennl/blogpost-actions-central

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