Update Item Field Projects (BETA) ✏️

This GitHub action updates item fields on Projects (beta).

The action is great to use in combination with project-add as you will need to obtain the item-id to update an item's field.

Field Type Support

• Text
• Number
• Date
• Single select
• Iteration

field-names are supplied as a CSV list of names.

          field-names: Status,Iteration,product,priority

field-values are supplied as a CSV list of corresponding values.

          field-values: todo,[0],back-end,high

Options and iterations are matched by the name(case-insensitive). You can also use an array index notation. For example [0] would be the first option or iteration. The first iteration is always the current one.

Usage

Create a workflow (eg: .github/workflows/on-issue-pr-open.yml). See Creating a Workflow file.

You will need a project number for input project-number. For example https://github.com/users/austenstone/projects/5 the project number is 5.

You will need to create a PAT(Personal Access Token) that has admin:org access so we can read/write to the project.

Add this PAT as a secret so we can use it as input github-token, see Creating encrypted secrets for a repository.

Organizations

If your project is part of an organization that has SAML enabled you must authorize the PAT, see Authorizing a personal access token for use with SAML single sign-on.

Example: Add Issues and PRs

name: "Add Issue/PR to Project"
on:
  issues:
    types: [opened]
  pull_request:
    types: [opened]

jobs:
  add_to_project:
    name: Add to Project
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: austenstone/project-add@main
        with:
          user: ${{ github.repository_owner }}
          project-number: 5
          github-token: "${{ secrets.MY_TOKEN }}"
        id: project-add
      - uses: austenstone/project-update@main
        with:
          user: ${{ github.repository_owner }}
          project-number: 5
          github-token: "${{ secrets.MY_TOKEN }}"
          item-id: ${{ steps.project-add.outputs.id }}
          field-names: product,priority
          field-values: back-end,high

Users

For user owned projects you must provide the user input in the workflow.

        with:
          user: ${{ github.repository_owner }}
          github-token: "${{ secrets.MY_TOKEN }}"
          project-number: 1234

Input Settings

Various inputs are defined in action.yml:

Name	Description	Default
project-number	The project number. Get this from the URL.	N/A
github-token	Token to use to authorize. This should be a personal access token.	${{ github.token }}
organization	The organization that owns of the project.	the repository owner
user	The user that owns of the project.	N/A
item-id	The item Id of the issue or pull request.	N/A
field-names	CSV fields to modify.	N/A
field-values	CSV fields values.	N/A

If you are using a user owned project board you must provide the user input.
${{ github.repository_owner }} is fine if you're the owner of the repository.

Permissions

Until GitHub supports permissions for projects (beta) we will need to create a PAT(Personal Access Token) with admin:org scope.

Once support is added you we can utilize Assigning permissions to jobs and the action will default to the token ${{ github.token }}.

permissions:
  repository-projects: write

Another option is to use something like tibdex/github-app-token to get a token during the workflow.

References

• Automating projects (beta)
• Example workflow authenticating with a GitHub App