Treat invalid workflow file as merge blocker

[dkaszews]

Why are you starting this discussion?

Question

What GitHub Actions topic or product is this about?

Workflow Configuration

Discussion Details

I recently discovered one of my workflows has not been running at all for some time, because I made a typo and wrote run mypy instead of run: mypy. This caused the entire workflow YAML file to be invalid, but instead of treating it as a blocker, the workflow was silently skipped alongside all other jobs from the same file. It was not until I noticed it missing on the checks list several PRs later and went to the PR checks tab that I saw the underlying issue.

Is there some repo setting where I can treat such workflow parsing errors as merge blockers to avoid such issue in the future? The only other thing I could think of is to write another check which runs yamllint on the workflows directory, but then the same kind of run yamllint .github/workflows instead of run: yamllint .github/workflows can take it down.

[liy8]

Why are you starting this discussion?

Question

What GitHub Actions topic or product is this about?

Workflow Configuration

Discussion Details

I recently discovered one of my workflows has not been running at all for some time, because I made a typo and wrote run mypy instead of run: mypy. This caused the entire workflow YAML file to be invalid, but instead of treating it as a blocker, the workflow was silently skipped alongside all other jobs from the same file. It was not until I noticed it missing on the checks list several PRs later and went to the PR checks tab that I saw the underlying issue.

Is there some repo setting where I can treat such workflow parsing errors as merge blockers to avoid such issue in the future? The only other thing I could think of is to write another check which runs yamllint on the workflows directory, but then the same kind of run yamllint .github/workflows instead of run: yamllint .github/workflows can take it down.

Use actionlint instead; actionlint is a static checker specifically designed for GitHub Actions workflow files that performs syntax checks, strong type checking for expressions, and validates action inputs/outputs. It would catch the exact error from the discussion (run mypy vs run: mypy).

[dkaszews]

But will it catch an error in the file calling actionlint? Or do I still have to count on that file to work?

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