GitHub Actions docs

Generate documentation with inputs and outputs from your action.yml file.

This project was inspired by terraform-docs.

You develop GitHub actions. You define available inputs and outputs in your action.yml file but since they are not immediatly available to your users, you also want to document those in your README.md file. However you want to automate this process, so you do not have to manually keep your README.md in sync.

github-actions-docs will read your actions.yml and automatically generate documentation out of it, optionally injecting those in an existing README.md file.

This project was inspired by terraform-docs.

Navigate to your repository that contains your GitHub action and install github-action-docs as a development dependency:

npm install --save-dev github-action-docs

You can now automatically generate a README.md file from your action.yml file:

npx github-action-docs --output-file README.md --mode overwrite action.yml

To only generate certain sections, you can list them:

npx github-action-docs --output-file README.md --sections inputs outputs --mode overwrite action.yml

# In case you list sections as the last option, you have to use -- before the
# final file name:
npx github-action-docs --output-file README.md --mode overwrite --sections inputs outputs -- action.yml

You can also inject documentation to an existing README.md file. Ensure you have markers in your README.md:

Some existing text in your README.md. It will not be overwritten.

<!-- BEGIN_GITHUB_ACTION_DOCS -->
everything in here will be replaced
<!-- END_GITHUB_ACTION_DOCS -->

Some existing text in your README.md. It will not be overwritten.

Now run github-action-docs in inject mode:

npx github-action-docs --output-file README.md --mode inject action.yml

In case you make use of prettier and/or linter, I recommend to disable it for the automatic code block:

Some existing text in your README.md. It will not be overwritten.

<!-- markdownlint-capture -->
<!-- markdownlint-disable -->
<!-- prettier-ignore-start -->
<!-- BEGIN_GITHUB_ACTION_DOCS -->
everything in here will be replaced
<!-- END_GITHUB_ACTION_DOCS -->
<!-- prettier-ignore-end -->
<!-- markdownlint-restore -->

Some existing text in your README.md. It will not be overwritten.

You can also create a task in your package.json:

{
    "name": "your-github-action",
    "scripts": {
        "gen-docs": "github-action-docs --output-file README.md --mode inject action.yml"
    }
}

And then simply execute npm run gen-docs to regenerate your documentation.

In order to run tests locally, execute the following

npm ci
npm run test:coverage

If you get an ERR_INSPECTOR_NOT_AVAILABLE error, make sure your nodejs is compiled with inspector support. Otherwise run npm run test to skip code coverage