GitHub Actions Adds Required Workflows and Configuration Variables

GitHub announced that it is adding two new features to GitHub Actions that will help with help standardizing policies and reducing duplication: required workflows and configuration variables.

“You no longer have to spend hours configuring hundreds of repositories to protect your critical software assets,” GitHub’s Ashok Kirla explains. “Required workflows along with reusable workflows, configuration variables, and secrets will help you apply a consistent set of standards across many repositories with just a couple of clicks.”

Required workflows, now in public beta, helps DevOps teams define and enforce standard continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices across source code repositories within an organization without needing to configure each separately. They can also help organizations invoke external vulnerability scoring or dynamic analysis tools, ensure that all code meets an enterprise’s quality standards, and ensure that code is continuously deployed in a standard way.

Configuration variables let developers store non-sensitive data as plain text variables that can be reused across workflows in their repository or within their organization. Variables can be defined at the Organization, Repository, or Environment level based on needs.