Searching for existing Github Actions has never been easier! [OUTDATED]

UPDATE: This blog post is outdated, support for Github Actions syntax in Popper has been deprecated. Popper now uses its own YAML syntax for specifying workflows. Read more in the official documentation.

With the release of Popper 2.3.0, we are happy to bring to you a searchable catalogue of prebuilt actions that keeps growing. Now you can easily search for different actions built by developers around the globe from within popper.

Note: This feature requires Popper 2.3.0+. If you are not familier with Popper, check out the getting started guide.

What am i talking about?

Let’s say you are building a Github Action workflow using Popper that uses ansible, so you might want to search actions based on ansible. Popper makes this easy for you with its search subcommand. Simply do,

$ popper search ansible

And you might want to go and grab a cup of coffee because for the first time popper search takes a while to fetch all the action metadata from the remote catalogue and cache it locally.

Demonstration of popper search

Popper searches the catalogue of actions and returns the actions relevant to the search keyword. All the subsequent searches will be lightning fast because then popper will search within the cached metadata. The search results are always in the form <org>/<repo>/<path/to/action>.

Additionally, you can tell popper to include the README.md of the action while searching as sometimes the action names might be much descriptive. For example,

$ popper search --include-readme ansible

Once the search is complete, you might want to know more information about the actions you need. For example, you can get the details of the ansible action by doing,

$ popper info popperized/ansible

Demonstration of popper info

The info subcommand displays the contents of the README.md file.

What if the catalogue gets updated?

To get the latest actions and updates from the catalogue, you can always update the local metadata cache while searching or while fetching info by doing,

$ popper search --update-cache <keyword>
$ popper info --update-cache <action>

Contributing to the catalogue!

To help the action catalogue become richer, feel free to add action references to this list by sending a pull request to the popper repository. 👍

References

For more about Popper, see our Github project or join our Gitter channel.