Go API

This document describes how to use actionlint as Go library.

actionlint can be used from Go programs by importing the module.

import "github.com/rhysd/actionlint"

See the documentation to know the list of all APIs. It contains a workflow file parser built on top of go-yaml/yaml, expression ${{ }} lexer/parser/checker, etc.

Followings are unexhaustive list of interesting APIs.

Command struct represents entire actionlint command. Command.Main takes command line arguments and runs command until the end and returns exit status.
Linter manages linter lifecycle and applies checks to given files. If you want to run actionlint checks in your program, please use this struct.
Project and Projects detect a project (Git repository) in a given directory path and find configuration in it.
Config represents structure of actionlint.yaml config file. It can be decoded by go-yaml/yaml library.
Workflow, Job, Step, ... are nodes of workflow syntax tree. Workflow is a root node.
Parse() parses given contents into a workflow syntax tree. It tries to find syntax errors as much as possible and returns found errors as slice.
Pass is a visitor to traverse a workflow syntax tree. Multiple passes can be applied at single pass using Visitor.
Rule is an interface for rule checkers and RuneBase is a base struct to implement a rule checker.
- RuleExpression is a rule checker to check expression syntax in ${{ }}.
- RuleShellcheck is a rule checker to apply shellcheck command to run: sections and collect errors from it.
- RuleJobNeeds is a rule checker to check dependencies in needs: section. It can detect cyclic dependencies.
- ...
ExprLexer lexes expression syntax in ${{ }} and returns slice of Token.
ExprParser parses given slice of Token and returns syntax tree for expression in ${{ }}. ExprNode is an interface for nodes in the expression syntax tree.
ExprType is an interface of types in expression syntax ${{ }}. ObjectType, ArrayType, StringType, NumberType, ... are structs to represent actual types of expression.
ExprSemanticsChecker checks semantics of expression syntax ${{ }}. It traverses given expression syntax tree and deduces its type, checking types and resolving variables (contexts).
ValidateRefGlob() and ValidatePathGlob() validate glob filter pattern and returns all errors found by the validator.
ActionMetadata is a struct for action metadata file (action.yml). It is used to check inputs specified at with: and typing steps.{id}.outputs object strictly.
PopularActions global variable is the data set of popular actions' metadata collected by the script.
AllWebhookTypes global variable is the mapping from all webhook names to their types collected by the script.
WorkflowKeyAvailability() returns available context names and special function names for the given workflow key like jobs.<job_id>.outputs.<output_id>. This function uses the data collected by the script.

Library versioning

The version of this repository is for command line tool actionlint. So it does not represent the version of the library. It means that the library does not follow semantic versioning and any patch version bump may introduce some breaking changes.

Go version compatibility

Minimum supported Go version is written in go.mod file in this repository. That said, older Go versions are actually not tested on CI. Last two major Go versions are recommended because they're tested on CI. For example, when the latest Go version is v1.22, v1.21 and v1.22 are nice to use.

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