Creating starter workflows for your organization

Overview

Starter workflows allow everyone in your organization who has permission to create workflows to do so more quickly and easily. When you create a new workflow, you can choose a starter workflow and some or all of the work of writing the workflow will be done for you. You can use starter workflows as a starting place to build your custom workflow or use them as-is. This not only saves time, it promotes consistency and best practice across your organization.

GitHub provides ready-to-use starter workflows for the following high level categories:

• Deployment (CD). For more information, see "About continuous deployment."
• Security. For more information, see "Setting up code scanning using starter workflows."
• Continuous Integration (CI). For more information, see "About continuous integration."
• Automation. Automation starter workflows offer solutions for automating workflows, such as triaging pull requests and applying a label based on the paths that are modified in the pull request, or greeting users who are first time contributors to the repository.

Creating a starter workflow

Starter workflows can be created by users with write access to the organization's .github repository. These can then be used by organization members who have permission to create workflows.

Starter workflows created by users can only be used to create workflows in public repositories. Organizations using GitHub Enterprise Cloud can also use starter workflows to create workflows in private repositories. For more information, see the GitHub Enterprise Cloud documentation.

This procedure demonstrates how to create a starter workflow and metadata file. The metadata file describes how the starter workflows will be presented to users when they are creating a new workflow.

1. If it doesn't already exist, create a new public repository named .github in your organization.

2. Create a directory named workflow-templates.

3. Create your new workflow file inside the workflow-templates directory.

   If you need to refer to a repository's default branch, you can use the $default-branch placeholder. When a workflow is created the placeholder will be automatically replaced with the name of the repository's default branch.

   For example, this file named octo-organization-ci.yml demonstrates a basic workflow.

   name: Octo Organization CI
   
   on:
     push:
       branches: [ $default-branch ]
     pull_request:
       branches: [ $default-branch ]
   
   jobs:
     build:
       runs-on: ubuntu-latest
   
       steps:
         - uses: actions/checkout@v3
   
         - name: Run a one-line script
           run: echo Hello from Octo Organization
   

4. Create a metadata file inside the workflow-templates directory. The metadata file must have the same name as the workflow file, but instead of the .yml extension, it must be appended with .properties.json. For example, this file named octo-organization-ci.properties.json contains the metadata for a workflow file named octo-organization-ci.yml:

   {
       "name": "Octo Organization Workflow",
       "description": "Octo Organization CI starter workflow.",
       "iconName": "example-icon",
       "categories": [
           "Go"
       ],
       "filePatterns": [
           "package.json$",
           "^Dockerfile",
           ".*\\.md$"
       ]
   }
   

   • name - Required. The name of the workflow. This is displayed in the list of available workflows.
   • description - Required. The description of the workflow. This is displayed in the list of available workflows.
   • iconName - Optional. Specifies an icon for the workflow that's displayed in the list of workflows. The iconName must be the name of an SVG file, without the file name extension, stored in the workflow-templates directory. For example, an SVG file named example-icon.svg is referenced as example-icon.
   • categories - Optional. Defines the language category of the workflow. When a user views the available starter workflows for a repository, the workflows that match the identified language for the project are featured more prominently. For information on the available language categories, see https://github.com/github/linguist/blob/master/lib/linguist/languages.yml.
   • filePatterns - Optional. Allows the workflow to be used if the user's repository has a file in its root directory that matches a defined regular expression.

To add another starter workflow, add your files to the same workflow-templates directory. For example:

Next steps

To continue learning about GitHub Actions, see "Using starter workflows."