Table of Contents

• Installation
• License

pip install gha-tools

You can also use pipx to directly run gha-tools.

Use gh-tools autoupdate on a workflow file or directory to automatically update the action versions to the latest available version.

• By default, the command will not write changes to the file system; use --write to have it do that.
• You can use --diff to see what changes would be made. This can be used in conjunction with --write.
• You can use --version-strategy=specific to update to a specific latest version tag instead of the major tag, e.g. v1.2.3 instead of v1. The default is to use the major tag, when available.
  • You can use --first-party-version-strategy and --third-party-version-strategy to set different version strategies for first-party and third-party actions respectively.

$ gha-tools autoupdate --diff .github/workflows
Updating .github/workflows/publish.yml...
  No changes to .github/workflows/publish.yml.
Updating .github/workflows/ci.yml...
--- .github/workflows/ci.yml
+++ .github/workflows/ci.yml
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@
             requirements*txt
       - run: 'pip install -e . -r requirements-test.txt'
       - run: py.test -vvv --cov .
-      - uses: codecov/codecov-action@v2
+      - uses: codecov/codecov-action@v3

   Lint:
     runs-on: ubuntu-20.04

GitHub Actions best practice is to pin the versions of actions to a specific version SHA, as tags may be mutable. You can use --pin to have gha-tools autoupdate pin the action to the latest commit SHA for the specified version tag. If you trust the first-party actions to use immutable tags, use --pin=third_party; otherwise use --pin=all.

$ gha-tools autoupdate --pin=third_party --diff .github/workflows
Updating .github/workflows/test.yml...
--- .github/workflows/test.yml
+++ .github/workflows/test.yml
@@ -12,13 +12,13 @@
   lint:
     runs-on: ubuntu-latest
     steps:
-      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
-      - uses: akx/[email protected]
+      - uses: actions/checkout@v5
+      - uses: akx/pre-commit-uv-action@19e2cbdb93404ff82f52044f07306443bc0bff7a # v0.1.0

You can use different version strategies for first-party and third-party actions. For example, to keep first-party actions on major versions but use specific versions for third-party actions:

$ gha-tools autoupdate --first-party-version-strategy=major --third-party-version-strategy=specific --diff .github/workflows
Updating .github/workflows/test.yml...
--- .github/workflows/test.yml
+++ .github/workflows/test.yml
@@ -5,6 +5,6 @@
     steps:
-      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
-      - uses: actions/setup-python@v4
-      - uses: codecov/codecov-action@v3
+      - uses: actions/checkout@v5
+      - uses: actions/setup-python@v6
+      - uses: codecov/[email protected]

Since this tool uses the GitHub API, you may run into rate limiting issues. You can specify your GitHub authentication via the environment variable GITHUB_TOKEN or GITHUB_AUTH.

If the value of the environment variable contains a colon (:), it will be interpreted as a username and password; this is useful with Personal Access Tokens, which are used with your GitHub username.

gha-tools is distributed under the terms of the MIT license.