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Starter workflows

Accelerating new GitHub Actions workflows

From actions·Updated June 18, 2026·View on GitHub·

These are the workflow files for helping people get started with GitHub Actions. They're presented whenever you start to create a new GitHub Actions workflow. The project is written primarily in TypeScript, distributed under the Other license, first published in 2019. It has gained significant community traction with 11,701 stars and 7,096 forks on GitHub. Key topics include: actions.

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Starter Workflows

These are the workflow files for helping people get started with GitHub Actions. They're presented whenever you start to create a new GitHub Actions workflow.

If you want to get started with GitHub Actions, you can use these starter workflows by clicking the "Actions" tab in the repository where you want to create a workflow.

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Note

Thank you for your interest in this GitHub repo, however, right now we are not taking contributions.

We continue to focus our resources on strategic areas that help our customers be successful while making developers' lives easier. While GitHub Actions remains a key part of this vision, we are allocating resources towards other areas of Actions and are not taking contributions to this repository at this time. The GitHub public roadmap is the best place to follow along for any updates on features we’re working on and what stage they’re in.

We are taking the following steps to better direct requests related to GitHub Actions, including:

  1. We will be directing questions and support requests to our Community Discussions area

  2. High Priority bugs can be reported through Community Discussions or you can report these to our support team https://support.github.com/contact/bug-report.

  3. Security Issues should be handled as per our security.md

We will still provide security updates for this project and fix major breaking changes during this time.

You are welcome to still raise bugs in this repo.

Directory structure

Each workflow must be written in YAML and have a .yml extension. They also need a corresponding .properties.json file that contains extra metadata about the workflow (this is displayed in the GitHub.com UI).

For example: ci/django.yml and ci/properties/django.properties.json.

Valid properties

  • name: the name shown in onboarding. This property is unique within the repository.
  • description: the description shown in onboarding
  • iconName: the icon name in the relevant folder, for example, django should have an icon icons/django.svg. Only SVG is supported at this time. Another option is to use octicon. The format to use an octicon is octicon <<icon name>>. Example: octicon person
  • creator: creator of the template shown in onboarding. All the workflow templates from an author will have the same creator field.
  • categories: the categories that it will be shown under. Choose at least one category from the list here. Further, choose the categories from the list of languages available here and the list of tech stacks available here. When a user views the available templates, those templates that match the language and tech stacks will feature more prominently.

Categories

  • continuous-integration
  • deployment
  • testing
  • code-quality
  • code-review
  • dependency-management
  • monitoring
  • Automation
  • utilities
  • Pages
  • Hugo

Variables

These variables can be placed in the starter workflow and will be substituted as detailed below:

  • $default-branch: will substitute the branch from the repository, for example main and master
  • $protected-branches: will substitute any protected branches from the repository
  • $cron-daily: will substitute a valid but random time within the day

How to test templates before publishing

Disable template for public

The template author adds a labels array in the template's properties.json file with a label preview. This will hide the template from users, unless user uses query parameter preview=true in the URL.
Example properties.json file:

json
{ "name": "Node.js", "description": "Build and test a Node.js project with npm.", "iconName": "nodejs", "categories": ["Continuous integration", "JavaScript", "npm", "React", "Angular", "Vue"], "labels": ["preview"] }

For viewing the templates with preview label, provide query parameter preview=true to the new workflow page URL. Eg. https://github.com/<owner>/<repo_name>/actions/new?preview=true.

Enable template for public

Remove the labels array from properties.json file to publish the template to public

Contributors

Showing top 12 contributors by commit count.

View all contributors on GitHub →

This article is auto-generated from actions/starter-workflows via the GitHub API.Last fetched: 6/18/2026