GitHub Action Get Commit Message

Question

So I am building an action that does a build for a project that will go to Netlify. In the action I can pass a deploy message. In that deploy message, I want to pass in the commit message of the commit that triggered the build. I was looking at documentation but could not find if this is possible. Thanks

Answer 1

You can get this in the github context for the action, as described here.

The event key will give you the webhook content, as defined here.

So, for your action, you can use something like:

${{ github.event.head_commit.message }}

Answer 2

You can get the concrete commit message with the following command:

github.event.head_commit.message

Or it is possible to get the commit messages with the git log command if you use bash:

git log -1 --pretty=format:"%s"

Update: With regard to the documentation, the payload and thus also the call of the commit message has changed. The message can be fetched with the following line in the GitHub action:

github.event.commits[0].message

Answer 3

There is a small difference between the two:

${{ github.event.commits[0].message }}

When the github push event contains several commits, commit[0] contains the oldest commit. I have seen this after a merge.

${{ github.event.head_commit.message }}

On the other hand, the head_commit contains the youngest commit.

Answer 4

The commit-message is available on the following keys:

• ${{ github.event.commits[0].message }}
• ${{ github.event.head_commit.message }}

There is quite a lot of other information available on events. For ex; the following workflow will give you all that information:

# .github/workflows/logger.yaml
name: Event Loggger
on: push

jobs:
  log-github-event-goodies:
    name: "LOG Everything on GitHub Event"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Logging
        run: |
          echo "${{toJSON(github.event)}}"