Compose GitHub actions as a single GitHub action

What I like from GitHub action is we can ensure that our action is up-to-date with available fixes in the upstream. E.g.: we can use actions/checkout@v2 and the CI will still run with the latest version of checkout@v2.

Unfortunately, this facility can’t be used while we’re creating a GitHub action. I think it’s better if we can compose multiple GitHub actions into a single GitHub action, or maybe just use one or two GitHub actions for the trivial tasks and continue the other in Javascript or Docker container.

This is an imaginary action.yml to serve as an example, maybe it’s cool if we can do this:

name: 'imaginary-extension'
description: 'Imaginary extension about composing actions'
runs:
  using: composite
  steps:
    - name: Python 3
      uses: actions/setup-python@v1
      with:
        python-version: 3.8
    - name: Requirements
      run: pip install -r requirements.txt

[hross]

We are picking up work here so keep an eye out for activity. We will update things as we go.

[chrispat]

We are targeting next week to make to make this available.