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Version: 1.20.6

Compared to GitHub Actions

Even though Gitea Actions is designed to be compatible with GitHub Actions, there are some differences between them.

Additional features​

Absolute action URLs​

Gitea Actions supports defining actions via absolute URL, which means that you can use actions from any git repository. Like uses: https://github.com/actions/checkout@v3 or uses: http://your_gitea.com/owner/repo@branch.

Actions written in Go​

Gitea Actions supports writing actions in Go. See Creating Go Actions.

Unsupported workflows syntax​

concurrency​

It's used to run a single job at a time. See Using concurrency.

It's ignored by Gitea Actions now.

run-name​

The name for workflow runs generated from the workflow. See Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions.

It's ignored by Gitea Actions now.

permissions and jobs.<job_id>.permissions​

See Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions.

It's ignored by Gitea Actions now.

jobs.<job_id>.timeout-minutes​

See Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions.

It's ignored by Gitea Actions now.

jobs.<job_id>.continue-on-error​

See Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions.

It's ignored by Gitea Actions now.

jobs.<job_id>.environment​

See Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions.

It's ignored by Gitea Actions now.

Complex runs-on​

See Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions.

Gitea Actions only supports runs-on: xyz or runs-on: [xyz] now.

workflow_dispatch​

See Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions.

It's ignored by Gitea Actions now.

hashFiles expression​

See Expressions

Gitea Actions doesn't support it now, if you use it, the result will always be empty string.

As a workaround, you can use go-hashfiles instead.

Missing features​

Variables​

See Variables.

It's under development.

Problem Matchers​

Problem Matchers are a way to scan the output of actions for a specified regex pattern and surface that information prominently in the UI. See Problem matchers.

It's ignored by Gitea Actions now.

Create an error annotation​

See Creating an annotation for an error

It's ignored by Gitea Actions now.

Missing UI features​

Pre and Post steps​

Pre and Post steps don't have their own section in the job log user interface.

Different behavior​

Downloading actions​

Gitea Actions doesn't download actions from GitHub by default. "By default" means that you don't specify the host in the uses field, like uses: actions/checkout@v3. As a contrast, uses: https://github.com/actions/checkout@v3 has specified host.

The missing host will be filled with https://gitea.com if you don't configure it. That means uses: actions/checkout@v3 will download the action from gitea.com/actions/checkout, instead of github.com/actions/checkout.

As mentioned, it's configurable. If you want your runners to download actions from GitHub or your own Gitea instance by default, you can configure it by setting [actions].DEFAULT_ACTIONS_URL. See Configuration Cheat Sheet.

Context availability​

Context availability is not checked, so you can use the env context on more places. See Context availability.

Known issues​

docker/build-push-action@v4​

See act_runner#119.

ACTIONS_RUNTIME_TOKEN is a random string in Gitea Actions, not a JWT. But the docker/build-push-action@v4 tries to parse the token as JWT and doesn't handle the error, so the job fails.

There are two workarounds:

Set the ACTIONS_RUNTIME_TOKEN to empty manually, like:

- name: Build and push
  uses: docker/build-push-action@v4
  env:
    ACTIONS_RUNTIME_TOKEN: ''
  with:
...

The bug has been fixed in a newer commit, but it has not been released. So you could use the latest version by specifying the branch name, like:

- name: Build and push
  uses: docker/build-push-action@master
  with:
...