Accessing your repo's contents within GitHub Actions

Posted on: Aug 29, 2020

When wanting to access the Filesystem through GitHub Actions, the main location that is focused is the root of the repository when a workflow is being run. To get to that location, GitHub Provides a GITHUB_WORKSPACE environment variable that is automatically setup as long as you've run the actions/checkout action.

For instance, if we're in a repo and want to grab all the files in a content/posts/ directory, here's a node snippet to access such:

const fs = require("fs");
const path = require("path");

const posts = fs.readdir(
  path.join(process.env.GITHUB_WORKSPACE, "content", "posts"),
);

With this, whether an action is local within the repo or a 3rd party action, either will be able to navigate to your repo within a workflow run and access its contents.