Validate issue form submissions
Important
As of version v2.0.0
, this action has been converted to ESM. Because of
this, custom validation scripts must be provided in ESM syntax. If you are
using CommonJS, you will need to convert your scripts to ESM. See
team.js
for an example.
This action is designed to be used in conjunction with issue forms to allow you to validate submitted issues against their template, as well as any developer-defined logic.
Out of the box, this action supports validating the following details based on the issue forms template used to create the issue.
Field Type | Validation |
---|---|
All | Required input missing |
Required input empty | |
Invalid input type | |
input |
|
textarea |
|
dropdown |
Input required / No selection(s) made |
Single-select input / Multiple selection(s) made | |
Selection(s) not in template | |
checkboxes |
Input required / No selection(s) made |
Selection(s) not in template | |
Required selection(s) are not chosen |
You can also include your own validation logic to run on the parsed issue! For example, you may want to validate that a team name input is a valid GitHub Team. See Custom Validators for more information.
Feel free to try the action out by submitting a New Thing Request!
Here is a simple example of how to use this action in your workflow. Make sure
to replace vX.X.X
with the latest versions of the actions.
name: Issue Opened/Edited
on:
issues:
types:
- opened
- edited
jobs:
validate:
name: Validate Issue
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
# This is required to access the repository's files. Specifically, the
# issue forms template and the additional validation configuration.
- name: Checkout Repository
id: checkout
uses: actions/checkout@vX.X.X
# Parse the issue body and convert it to JSON.
- name: Parse Issue Body
id: parse
uses: issue-ops/parser@vX.X.X
with:
body: ${{ github.event.issue.body }}
issue-form-template: example-request.yml
workspace: ${{ github.workspace }}
# Validate the parsed issue body against the issue form template. This
# example does not use custom validators.
- name: Validate Issue
id: validate
uses: issue-ops/validator@vX.X.X
with:
issue-form-template: example-request.yml
parsed-issue-body: ${{ steps.parse.outputs.json }}
workspace: ${{ github.workspace }}
- name: Output Validation Results
id: output
run: |
echo "Result: ${{ steps.validate.outputs.result }}"
echo "Errors: ${{ steps.validate.outputs.errors }}"
As a more complex example, suppose you want to include custom validation logic that relies on additional npm libraries. In this case, you would need to ensure those libraries are available on the runner before validation takes place.
name: Issue Opened/Edited
on:
issues:
types:
- opened
- edited
jobs:
validate:
name: Validate Issue with Custom Logic
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
# This is required to access the repository's files. Specifically, the
# issue forms template and the additional validation configuration.
- name: Checkout Repository
id: checkout
uses: actions/checkout@vX.X.X
# Install Node.js on the runner.
- name: Setup Node.js
id: setup-node
uses: actions/setup-node@vX.X.X
with:
node-version: 20
# Install dependencies from `package.json`.
- name: Install Dependencies
id: install
run: npm install
# Parse the issue body and convert it to JSON.
- name: Parse Issue Body
id: parse
uses: issue-ops/parser@vX.X.X
with:
body: ${{ github.event.issue.body }}
issue-form-template: example-request.yml
workspace: ${{ github.workspace }}
# Validate the parsed issue body against the issue form template. This
# example does use custom validators.
- name: Validate Issue
id: validate
uses: issue-ops/validator@vX.X.X
with:
issue-form-template: example-request.yml
parsed-issue-body: ${{ steps.parse.outputs.json }}
workspace: ${{ github.workspace }}
- name: Output Validation Results
id: output
run: |
echo "Result: ${{ steps.validate.outputs.result }}"
echo "Errors: ${{ steps.validate.outputs.errors }}"
Input | Description |
---|---|
add-comment |
Add a success/failure comment |
Default: true |
|
github-token |
GitHub PAT for authentication |
Default: ${{ github.token }} |
|
issue-form-template |
Template .yml file in .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE |
issue-number |
The issue number to validate |
Default: ${{ github.event.issue.number }} |
|
parsed-issue-body |
The parsed issue body to validate |
workspace |
The path where the repository was cloned |
Default: ${{ github.workspace }} |
Output | Description |
---|---|
result |
success or failure |
errors |
A list of validation error messages (if any) |
This action supports custom validation logic in the form of a configuration file and additional JavaScript files in the repository where you are calling this action. For example, the New Thing Request issue form validates that the Read Team and Write Team inputs are valid GitHub Teams.
Check out the following sections for instructions on how to set this up in your repository!
First, a configuration file must be created at .github/validator/config.yml
.
The content of the file should follow the below format:
validators:
- field: read-team
script: team
- field: write-team
script: team
Property | Description |
---|---|
field |
The id attribute of the input in the issue form template |
If id is not provided, the label attribute will be used |
|
Must be camel-cased, and all special characters removed | |
This matches the output format of the issue-ops/parser action |
|
E.g. My Input Name :D -> my_input_name |
|
script |
The path and name of the script to call |
Relative to the validator directory |
Next, you must include any validation script(s) referenced in config.yml
.
These scripts must have the following behavior:
- Accept inputs of the following types:
string
(Input and Textarea)string[]
(Dropdown){label: string; required: boolean }
(Checkboxes)
- Return
'success'
for successful validation - Return an error message (
string
) for unsuccessful validation
For an example, see team.js
.
Isn't running arbitrary scripts dangerous?
🔥 Yes! 🔥 That's why it is highly recommended to only use this action
on event types such as
on: issues
.
In GitHub Actions, certain triggers use files from non-default branches. This
can be a big security risk when arbitrary scripts are involved.
The
on: issues
event will only trigger a workflow run if the workflow file is on the default branch.
Along with this, you must make sure to not pull branches with untrusted
validation scripts into the workspace where this action is run (by default the
actions/checkout
action will pull the default branch).
If your custom validator requires libraries that are not included on
GitHub-hosted runners
(or not installed on self-hosted runners), you will need to include additional
steps in the workflow to ensure that they are available before this action runs.
For example, if you wanted to include the yaml
library for parsing YAML files,
you would need to do the following:
-
Create a
package.json
in your repositorynpm init -y
-
Install the
yaml
librarynpm install yaml
-
Update your GitHub Actions workflow to setup Node.js and install dependencies
# This is required to access the repository's files. Specifically, the # issue forms template and the additional validation configuration. - name: Checkout Repository id: checkout uses: actions/checkout@vX.X.X # If your validation scripts include any third-party dependencies, you # will need to install them. First, setup Node.js on the runner. - name: Setup Node.js id: setup-node uses: actions/setup-node@vX.X.X with: node-version: 20 cache: npm # Next, install the dependencies from `package.json`. - name: Install Dependencies id: install run: npm install # Now you're good to go! - name: Parse Issue Body id: parse uses: issue-ops/parser@vX.X.X with: body: ${{ github.event.issue.body }} issue-form-template: example-request.yml workspace: ${{ github.workspace }} # Validate the parsed issue body against the issue form template and any # custom validation scripts. You can also pass in additional inputs as # environment variables. - name: Validate Issue id: validate uses: issue-ops/validator@vX.X.X env: ORGANIZATION: issue-ops with: issue-form-template: example-request.yml parsed-issue-body: ${{ steps.parse.outputs.json }} workspace: ${{ github.workspace }}
By default, the GitHub token available to workflows has specific permissions
that are limited to the repository the workflow is running in. If you have
custom validators that need to call other GitHub APIs, you will need to provide
either a personal access token (PAT), or use a GitHub App to authenticate.
Either one can be passed to the action in the github-token
input.
For GitHub App authentication, you can use the
actions/create-github-app-token
action to generate a token and pass it to the validation step.
- name: Generate App Token
id: token
uses: actions/create-github-app-token@vX.X.X
with:
app_id: ${{ secrets.ISSUEOPS_DEMO_APP_ID }}
private_key: ${{ secrets.ISSUEOPS_DEMO_APP_KEY }}
- name: Validate Issue
id: validate
uses: issue-ops/validator@vX.X.X
env:
ORGANIZATION: issue-ops
with:
github-token: ${{ steps.token.outputs.token }}
issue-form-template: example-request.yml
parsed-issue-body: ${{ steps.parse.outputs.json }}
workspace: ${{ github.workspace }}
If the add-comment
input is set to true
, a comment will be added to the
issue that triggered the action. The comment will include the results of the
validation job. By default, the comments look like this:
Default success comment:
:tada: Issue validated successfully!
Default failure comment:
:no_entry: There were errors validating the issue body:
- Error message
You can customize the success/failure comments by including custom templates in
the .github/validator/
directory. If either template is present, it will be
used to generate the comment that is added after validation completes.
As you can probably guess, these are Handlebars templates 😉
Result | Template Filename | Input Type | Input Description |
---|---|---|---|
Success | success.mustache |
JSON | The parsed issue body |
Failure | failure.mustache |
string[] |
The validation error(s) |
You can reference the inputs to each template to customize the presentation and
format to your liking. For examples, check out
failure.mustache
and
success.mustache
.