Read File Action

A GitHub Action to read a file and export its contents

Table of Contents

📖 Usage
📋 Inputs
📋 Outputs
📃 Workflow Example
📑 License

📖 Usage

Use this action in a workflow step

- name: read-file
  id: read-file
  uses: Shresht7/read-file-action@v1
  with:
    path: ./README.md

You can then access the output contents using expressions.

${{ steps.read-file.outputs.contents }}

Note: this assumes you set the id as read-file.

You can tell this action to automatically parse yaml or json by specifying the parse input.

- name: read-file
  id: read-file
  uses: Shresht7/read-file-action@v1
  with:
    path: ./package.json
    parse: json

You can also set parse to true to let the action automatically determine the file-extension.

The parsed contents will be available as a stringified JSON. This output can be used by fromJSON in an expression or JSON.parse in an action.

📋 Inputs

Input	Description	Default	Required
`path`	Path to the file to read (can be a URL)	`undefined`	required
`parse`	Parse the file contents as `yaml` or `json`. If `true`, will try to automatically determine the file-extension. You can set it to `yaml` or `json` manually too. If `false`, it will return the raw string	`undefined`

📋 Outputs

Output	Description
`contents`	The contents of the file

📃 Workflow Example

The following workflow snippet demonstrates how this action can be used to read a file and its contents can be used by other actions. The snippet itself is placed here using this action in conjunction with the markdown-slots action.

Click to show

# ================
# READ FILE ACTION
# ================

name: Read File Example

# Activation Events
# =================

on:
  # When this workflow file changes
  push:
    branches:
      - main
    paths:
      - .github/workflows/example-workflow.yml

  # Manual workflow dispatch
  workflow_dispatch:

# Jobs
# ====

jobs:
  update-readme:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # Actions Checkout ✅
      # ===================

      - name: checkout
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      # Read File 📄
      # ============

      - name: read-file
        id: read-file
        uses: Shresht7/read-file-action@v1
        with:
          path: .github/workflows/example-workflow.yml

      # Markdown Slots 📋
      # =================

      - name: markdown-slots
        id: markdown-slots
        uses: Shresht7/markdown-slots@v1
        with:
          slots: |
            - slot: example
              content: ${{ toJSON(steps.read-file.outputs.contents) }}
          # steps.read-file.outputs.contents is itself a YAML string (example-workflow.yml)
          # which causes markdown-slots action to try and parse it as a part of content and fail.
          # the toJSON function forces the results into a one-line string.

      # Push Changes 🌎
      # ===============

      - name: check for changes
        id: git-diff
        run: |
          if git diff --exit-code; then
            echo "::set-output name=changes_exist::false"
          else
            echo "::set-output name=changes_exist::true"
          fi

      - name: push
        if: ${{ steps.git-diff.outputs.changes_exist == 'true' }}
        run: |
          git config user.name 'github-actions[bot]'
          git config user.email 'github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com'
          git add .
          git commit -m 'Update README.md 📄'
          git push

📑 License

MIT