How to get the workflow run ID?

[rffontenelle]

I would like to send a Telegram message containing the URL of a specific workflow run when it failed. I found how to send Telegram message (via appleboy/telegram-action), found the repository info using  ${{ github.repository }} , but I still haven’t found how to get that specific workflow run ID.  By ID, I mean the 12345 in https://github.com/foo/bar/actions/12345.

How can I get the workflow run ID?

[Yanjingzhu]

@rffontenelle 

Do you mean the run id in https://github.com/foo/bar/actions/ runs /12345.? 

run id.png815×510 23.6 KB

There is a run_id property of github context. You could use ${{ github.run_id }} to get the run ID.  

[Novodes]

In case you need to extract it from the command line, you can use this script in bash:

RUNID=$(gh api repos/$OWNER/$REPO/commits/$COMMIT_SHA/check-runs | jq -r '.check_runs[] | select(.name == "NAME_OF_YOUR_GITHUB_ACTIONS_WORKFLOW") | .html_url | capture("/runs/(?<number>[0-9]+)/jobs") | .number' | sed 's/"//g' | head -n 1)

Full explanation on StackOverflow: https://stackoverflow.com/a/76465815/4441211

[Calinou]

I've tried that one-liner to get the run ID of an older commit within https://github.com/godotengine/godot, but I can't get it to work (the variable is empty).

This is what I tried:

RUNID=$(gh api repos/godotengine/godot/commits/94dbf69f5d6b7d2fd9561692df2e71557607fddc/check-runs | jq -r '.check_runs[] | select(.name == "🔗 GHA") | .html_url | capture("/runs/(?<number>[0-9]+)/jobs") | .number' | sed 's/"//g' | head -n 1)

🔗 GHA is the name of the main workflow file I'm interested in (it's defined in .github/workflows/runner.yml). I want to get a list of its artifacts so I can download them with nightly.link and compare their binary sizes with a PR build (so I can't rely on a PAT, hence the use of nightly.link). There are premade actions out there to compare bundle sizes but here, I'm comparing sizes of compiled C++ binaries that take a long time to compile (so building them twice isn't an option). There's also an action to compare an artifact's size to a GitHub release's size, but the binaries I'm comparing against aren't uploaded to GitHub Releases, only artifacts.

Running this alone results in a lot of forks appearing in the list, which surprises me:

gh api repos/godotengine/godot/commits/94dbf69f5d6b7d2fd9561692df2e71557607fddc/check-runs

[jayeshkumarpatel2611]

How we can obtain run id if we dispatch workflow using api in powershell script?

[Novodes]

Doesn't this answer your question: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/26965#discussioncomment-6164539

[seanorama]

No. A GitHub workflow can be run directly with a dispatch event.

In that case, there is no commit to build on.

This is an incredibly large oversight, that a workflow system does not return anything about it's run. It's not a useful workflow system if you can't programmatically track the result.

As seen in the API docs, a worfklow dispatch only ever returns:

Status: 204

You expect any workflow/job/... based API to respond the ID of the thing it created.

https://docs.github.com/en/rest/actions/workflows?apiVersion=2022-11-28#create-a-workflow-dispatch-event

[xzrderek]

totally agree, i would've expected a workflow dispatch to return run_id so we can correlate it back.

[seanorama]

It's basic asynchronous API development. You submit a request, you get back the id. Any solution that requires filters on other values is simply a workaround.

[infinisil]

A less hacky alternative to the above is to use the API endpoint for listing workflow runs and filtering by associated commit:

gh api /repos/$OWNER/$REPO/actions/workflows/$WORKFLOW_FILE_OR_ID/runs \
  --method GET -f head_sha=$COMMIT_SHA

[wn2try]

List recent workflow runs of the current repository, with the ID present:

gh run list -R ${{ github.repository }}

Filter options are available, here is the manual.

[sergeydobrodey]

See https://github.blog/changelog/2026-02-19-workflow-dispatch-api-now-returns-run-ids/