release-engineers/github-workflow-event-json

This repository contains captures of the many different event payloads and context variables available to a GitHub workflow.

May I see them?

You can find them in the specific event folders in the on directory. For example, all information captured for the event of a pull request being merged can be found in "on/pull_request/closed".

Note that we don't have all events but we certainly have most of them.

How does it work?

We have set up a repository in a separate GitHub organization that captures the JSON representation of most GitHub Actions variables, along with some extra data. Whenever an event occurs, it uploads this data as a GitHub Actions artifact.

Every sunday, this repository then downloads any artifacts generated. We may have missed some more exotic events, but this repository certainly contains most of them.

I'm getting different results!

The content of all context variables is dependent on many factors, here's how we capture it:

We captured events from the past; GitHub infrastructure, runners and even event structure may have changed since then.
We captured events that did or didn't happen during a GitHub outage. (This is known as "degraded performance" on GitHub's status page).
We use the bash shell on an ubuntu-latest runner.
We don't make use of the container, reusable workflows, or composite actions feature of GitHub Actions.

These all may lead to different results than you're seeing in your own workflows.