Creating a composite action

The third type of actions, besides Docker container actions and JavaScript/TypeScript actions, are composite actions. Composite actions are a wrapper for other actions. In this recipe, you will create a simple composite action and use it in a workflow – once with a bash script and once with a GitHub script.

Getting ready…

Create a new repository called CompositeActionRecipe. Make it public so that you don’t consume any action minutes and initialize it with a README file. Clone the repository locally and open it in VS Code or open it in GitHub Codespaces.

How to do it…

1. Add a new file called action.yml to the root of the repository. Add a name and description:

   name: 'Composite Action Recipe'
   description: 'Greets the user and returns 42.'

2. Add an input called who-to-greet and an output called answer. Note that you need the step ID to access the output. We’ll add that in the next step:

   inputs...