Documentation for github.event objects

[MrSkwiggs]

Is there a way to see the actual documentation / specs for the github object we can access when setting up workflows? I tried to echo github.event for instance but that just prints object…

My end goal is to have a workflow run only on PR merges or manual triggers, so I have the following configuration:

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  pull_request:
    types: [closed]

and in my job, I do indeed need to check if the PR is merged

my-run:
    runs-on: [ubuntu-latest]
    if: ${{ github.event.pull_request.merged }}
    # more steps

but that means that if I trigger a manual workflow, the if clause prevents it from ever running… How can tell my if that I also want to run on workflow_dispatch? I tried to add || github.event.workflow_dispatch in there but that just doesn’t do anything… And because I can’t find exactly what is included in github.event, I don’t know what to try.

So my question is two-fold:

• Where can I find detailed docs for all of the github.event objects & their sub-objects?
• How can I have a workflow run on either a merged pr or a manual workflow_dispatch?

For reference, I did read through https://docs.github.com/en/free-pro-team@latest/actions/reference/context-and-expression-syntax-for-github-actions#github-context but that only covers some of the docs

UPDATE
So searching around I managed to find a way to echo any object by using toJson(<object>). But for workflow_dispatch I couldn’t find any relevant information 😕

[airtower-luna]

The best documentation I’m aware of is here: Events that trigger workflows

For most event types there’s a link to the webhook event payload documentation in the section on that event type on that page, e.g. here is the one for workflow_dispatch. I agree that is kind of complicated to find.

[MrSkwiggs]

Thanks for the response. Unfortunately I had already seen this page too and there isn’t much there either in terms of verifying that the event is indeed for workflow_dispatch.

[MrSkwiggs]

I did manage to find how to do so by first adding a step to print out the github object.

steps:
  - name: Echo github obj
    run: echo ${{ toJson(github) }}

This allowed me to see that the github object contains an event_name key, which, in the case of a workflow_dispatch event, contains workflow_dispatch.

It was then very easy to modify my if clause to also check for this key.

my-job:
  runs-on: [ubuntu-latest]
  if: github.event.pull_request.merged || github.event_name == 'workflow_dispatch'
  steps:
    # more steps

note: somehow using double quotes around "workflow_dispatch" in the if clause raises an error (Unknown identifier), so make sure to use single quotes

[LucasMMota]

GitHub should document this better for us. It's hard to understand how things work

[izambl]

Using echo threw some errors for me
I used this one to avoid errors:

      - name: Check object
        run: |
          cat << OBJECT
          ${{ toJson(github) }}
          OBJECT

[wesleyscholl]

I also had issues running: run: echo ${{ toJson(github) }}

- name: Check object
        run: |
          cat << OBJECT
          ${{ toJson(github) }}
          OBJECT

^^^ Worked for me - thanks! And I also agree that this should be better documented. Bits and pieces are fragmented over many GitHub Docs pages.

[believelody]

For those who still search documentation about payload, here is a link which can help y'all:
https://docs.github.com/en/webhooks/webhook-events-and-payloads

[chuckwondo]

FYI, you need single quotes around what you're echoing: echo '${{ toJson(github) }}'

You cannot use double quotes because the value returned by the call to toJson contains double quotes itself. Further, you must quote the result somehow because the result also contains newlines, so using single quotes does the trick in this situation.