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by 0xbadcafebee 262 days ago
A custom language in GHA would be worse. You'd be limited by whatever language they supported, and any problems with it would have to go through their support team. It adds more burden on GHA (they spending more time/money on support) without creating value (new features you want).

You already don't have to use YAML. Use whatever language you want to define the configuration, and then dump it as YAML. By using your own language and outputting YAML, you get to implement any solution you want, and GitHub gets to spend more cycles building features.

Simple example:

  1. Create a couple inherited Python classes
  2. Write class functions to enable/disable GHA features and validate them
  3. Have the functions store data in the class object
  4. Use a library to output the class as YAML
  5. Now craft your GHA config by simply calling a Python object
  6. Run code, save output file, apply to your repo
I don't know why nobody has made this yet, but it wouldn't be hard. Read GHA docs, write Python classes to match, output as YAML.

If you want more than GHA features support [via configuration], use the GHA API (https://docs.github.com/en/rest/actions) or scripted workflows feature (https://github.com/actions/github-script).
2 comments
doublet00th 262 days ago
This is what we built at my last startup Pangea (except with GitLab CI/CD). It worked pretty well and I always wanted to open-source it, but alas in a startup there's never enough time.
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tarkaTheRotter 262 days ago
Hey. I'm currently making Typeflows to solve this (amongst) another few pain points, and am planning to make it available in JVM (this exists now)/TS and Python at least.

There are existing solutions around, but do miss out a bunch of things that are blatantly missing in the space:

- workflow visualisations (this is already working - you can see an example of workflow relationship and breakdowns on a non-trivial example at https://github.com/http4k/http4k/tree/master/.github/typeflo...);

- running workflows through an event simulator so you can tell cause and effect when it comes to what triggers what. Testing workflows anyone? :)

- security testing on workflows - to avoid the many footguns that there are in GHA around secrets etc;

- compliance tests around permitted Action versions;

- publishing of reusable repository files as binary dependencies that can be upgraded and compiled into your projects - including not just GHA actions and workflows but also things like version files, composable Copilot/Claude/Cursor instruction files;

- GitLab, CircleCI, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps support using the same approach and in multiple languages;

Early days yet, but am planning to make it free for OSS and paid for commercial users. I'm also dogfooding it on one of my other open source projects so to make sure that it can handle non-trivial cases. Lots to do - and hopefully it will be valuable enough for commercial companies to pay for!

Wish me luck!

https://typeflows.io/

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