Get the current pushed tag in Github Actions

Question

Is there a way to access the current tag that has been pushed in a Github Action? In CircleCI you can access this value with the $CIRCLE_TAG variable.

My Workflow yaml is being triggered by a tag like so:

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - 'v*.*.*'

And I want to use that version number as a file path later on in the workflow.

Answer 1

As far as I know there is no tag variable. However, it can be extracted from GITHUB_REF which contains the checked out ref, e.g. refs/tags/v1.2.3

Try this workflow. It creates a new environment variable with the extracted version that you can use in later steps.

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - 'v*.*.*'
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Set env
        run: echo "RELEASE_VERSION=${GITHUB_REF#refs/*/}" >> $GITHUB_ENV
      - name: Test
        run: |
          echo $RELEASE_VERSION
          echo ${{ env.RELEASE_VERSION }}

Alternatively, use set-output:

on:
  push:
    tags:
      - 'v*.*.*'
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Set output
        id: vars
        run: echo ::set-output name=tag::${GITHUB_REF#refs/*/}
      - name: Check output
        env:
          RELEASE_VERSION: ${{ steps.vars.outputs.tag }}
        run: |
          echo $RELEASE_VERSION
          echo ${{ steps.vars.outputs.tag }}