Clarification about "working with any ref" changes

[prince-chrismc]

👋 First off, thank you for this action (it's a huge help)

I was updating my repo to the latest version v8 because I wanted to take advantage of

now work with whatever ref has been checked out, without pulling or switching branches by default.

In my workflow on a pull_request event I simply use the default option with actions/checkout@v2 here

However this fails https://github.com/prince-chrismc/label-merge-conflicts-action/runs/4892752781?check_suite_focus=true#step:8:79 with fatal: You are not currently on a branch.

My use case is very similar to the example https://github.com/EndBug/add-and-commit#automated-linting just a different event 🤔

Do you have any suggestion or ideas to help me debug this issue?

Thanks in advance ❤️

[EndBug]

Hi, thanks for using the action!

By default actions/checkout creates a detached head state when the run is triggered by a pull_request event. If you want to commit to the head branch you would need to checkout the branch the PR is coming from in the head repo.

I would set it up like this:

- uses: actions/checkout@v2
    with:
      repository: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.repo.full_name }}
      ref: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.ref }}

You can find the full docs for payloads of pull_request events here.

If you're planning on running this only on "internal" PRs then you could omit the repository input. If you're planning to use this with PRs coming from other forks, please keep in mind that you might not have write access to that repo. You can try setting up the repo with your PAT, but honestly, I've never tried.

PS: I see that your workflow runs on both pull_request events and other ones: since this "custom checkout" is meant only for PRs, you could try having it run only for pull_request events, while other ones will trigger the usual checkout. If you wish to do so, you can use the step.if property, here's the docs.

Anyway, I think this is something worthy of putting in the FAQ section of the README, since other people might want to use the action in this scenario.

I hope this solves your issue!

[fasanosalvatore]

I have the same problem, the action fails (https://github.com/fasanosalvatore/FitDiary/runs/4908561536?check_suite_focus=true) on pull_request event even if I set the ref parameter as indicated.

[EndBug]

@fasanosalvatore ref is an input of actions/checkout, not of my action, you have to add it to the first step of your workflow.

[prince-chrismc]

By default actions/checkout creates a detached head state when the run is triggered by a pull_request event.

that was what I was missing, Thanks for the pointer.

I already handled forks and dependabot by checking the permissions since that covers my use case better 😄

Just adding ref input to actions/checkout failed to push, doing some digging it seems the default token does not have workflow permission so I needed to use a PAT.

My PR is passing now. 🎉

ℹ️ I actually still have part of my CI running v7 with ref and token for actions/checkout and it fails so thanks for this improvement!

[EndBug]

Happy to hear that!
I'll close this issue as soon as I add the FAQ section to the README, let's keep this open in the meanwhile

[EndBug]

@all-contributors please add @prince-chrismc for their docs contribution

[allcontributors]

@EndBug

I've put up a pull request to add @prince-chrismc! 🎉