Feature: approve environment deployments for GitHub Actions workflows

[HariSekhon]

Describe the feature or problem you’d like to solve

Approve GitHub Actions workflows deployments from the CLI.

Proposed solution

It will make it quicker and easier to approve environment deployments, which at the moment it takes at least 3 clicks per deployment approval per job in the workflow.

This feature would alleviate when there are multiple approvals needed for a single workflow due to it containing multiple jobs, which can quickly become tedious (see community/community#14417) because it can then be more easily automated.

Additional Information

Other related tickets: #5541 #5149

It looks like gh deployment subcommand feature is needed in general.

[HariSekhon]

Looks like the Rest API may not support this yet either, so I've just requested it be added to the API so the CLI can support this:

community/community#18088

[mislav]

Thanks for your feature request and for requesting the API separately in the community forum!

Without an API, we can't add this feature to CLI. Therefore, I will close this in favor of ongoing threads in the community org. Feel free to reopen once an API is available 👌

[relsqui]

I'm not sure whether it existed when this issue was opened, but this appears to be an endpoint that would enable this feature (which I would also love): https://docs.github.com/en/rest/actions/workflow-runs#review-pending-deployments-for-a-workflow-run

[HariSekhon]

@mislav I don't think I have permissions to re-open this issue now the API support is available, can you please re-open it?

[mislav]

@HariSekhon Thanks for updating the thread! Would you imagine this functionality to live under our current Actions commands, e.g. gh run <command>, or under a hypothetical gh deployment command that offers general tasks for managing deployments? We've briefly considered adding deployment-related functionality, but we've opted against it due to lack of resources and hoped that maybe someone creates an extension for it: #5541

[HariSekhon]

@mislav I'd go with gh deployment

[jdavredbeard]

It would be more intuitive to me for this functionality to be under gh run or gh workflow since not all GHA actions are necessarily deployments (and also my org isn't using the deployments functionality)... I'm interested in giving this code a shot

[samcoe]

@jdavredbeard Can you explain a bit more about how your org is using workflow approvals? From my understanding you can only implement them using deployment protection rules. Unless you are talking about approving workflow runs on a pull request, which is a different feature?

[jdavredbeard]

Ah, I guess I am not using GitHub terminology correctly - I am referring to this feature https://docs.github.com/en/actions/managing-workflow-runs/reviewing-deployments - however, the way we are using it, our 'environment' is not a reference to a deployment environment, it is simply called 'manual approval' - any GHA job that needs a simple manual approval from anyone on the team references that same environment. I hadn't investigated the full feature set of deployments yet as we haven't needed them. Whoops! The way I would intuitively think about it, the feature of approving a job would be under workflows or runs, not deployments - but I suppose that would go against the grain of the way GitHub is categorizing these concepts.

[samcoe]

Yeah the nomenclature of these features can be a confusing to say the least. We do want to keep consistent with the other GitHub products thought so putting this feature under a new deployment command makes the most sense I think.

[BrettMoan]

gh run says

List, view, and watch recent workflow runs from GitHub Actions.

its doing most of what one does on the UI for workflows, with the exception of the approving of deployments as part of a workflow.

I think putting this under gh run is the right place, especially since when you run gh workflow view <some_workflow> you see at the bottom:

To see more runs for this workflow, try: gh run list --workflow <>.yaml
To see the YAML for this workflow, try: gh workflow view <>.yaml --yaml