Today, I struggled to pass an input variable that is not of type String to a GithubAction. Following the constraints of the yaml file-format, I passed a boolean, a String and a List<String>.
inputs:
boolean_value:
required: false
string_value:
required: false
list_of_strings:
required: false
jobs:
job_name:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
env:
ENV_VAR1: Hello
ENV_VAR1: World
steps:
- uses: action-name
with:
my_boolean: true
string_value: "someValue"
list_of_strings: [ $ENV_VAR1, $ENV_VAR2 ]
Processing the inputs, I couldn't access elements of the list and the variables didn't get dereferenced.
GithubActions uses a shell under the hood to handle those variables so everything is converted to a String -> processing the input Array/List doesn't work directly. The most straightforward way I found was using this jQuery:
for i in $(jq -r '.[]' <<< '${{ list_of_strings }}'); do
Passing variables into a List of Strings (so a String concatenation to be precise) should look like that:
list_of_strings: '[ "${{ ENV_VAR1 }}" , "${{ ENV_VAR2 }}" ]'