ActionsPanel – Manually Trigger Your GitHub Actions

Hi all!

I wanted to share a small project that I've been working on with a buddy.

https://www.actionspanel.app/

One of the problems that currently exists with GitHub Actions is the fact that there is no way to easily trigger your Actions unless you cause some kind of GitHub event. This could be pushing a new commit, or creating an issue on a repository. But if you just want to run an arbitrary action, there's not currently a good way to do that.

This is a well known feature request: https://github.community/t5/GitHub-Actions/GitHub-Actions-Manual-Trigger-Approvals/td-p/31504

GitHub somewhat recently added an API for `repository_dispatch` which is an available trigger for a GitHub Action. There are many blog posts that explain how you can create a Personal Access Token to send your own `repository_dispatch` via some curl command or postman request.

For example: https://goobar.io/2019/12/07/manually-trigger-a-github-actions-workflow/

ActionsPanel uses this same API but does so with a GitHub App token so that you don't need to worry about managing your own PAT. This also makes it much easier to trigger your actions across teams with multiple people. Then you don't need to share the PAT with each other or each create your own PATs.

You configure your buttons with a declarative yaml file that you leave in the repo, and ActionsPanel will read that file and dynamically create your UI for you to trigger your actions.

We'd love to get your feedback on this project. It's very simple still but solves the core problem of triggering your actions.

If you do have feedback or any questions, feel free to post in this thread, or email us directly at support (at) actionspanel (dot) app

Looking forward to your feedback!