Watchgha

Monday 13 March 2023

I wrote a simple thing to watch the progress of GitHub Actions: watchgha.

I started by using gh run list, and tailoring the output, but that required running the command obsessively to see the changes. Then I tried gh run watch, but I didn’t like the way it worked. You had to pick one action to watch, but my branch has two actions that run automatically, and I need to know when both are done. Plus, it lists all of the steps, which makes my complex action matrix fill more than a screen, so I can’t even see the progress.

So I wrote my own. It buckets together the start times of the runs to present them as a coherent run triggered by a single event. It keeps showing runs as long as they have a new action to show. It presents the steps in a compact form, and collapses jobs and runs once they succeed.

Give it a try and let me know if it works for you.

Screen shot of watching the progress of GitHub Actions

Comments

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Hi Ned! 👋 Thanks and congratulations for creating yet another useful project! 🎉 I read this post about it in my feed reader and misread the name of the project as ‘watchingha’ only to realize later that it was ‘watchgha’. So I wanted to suggest the former as a name for this project. Keep up the awesome work!

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“Watching, Ha!” would be a good name :)

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I don’t know if you’re a Mac user, but if so, you might find github-actions-status-mac-menu-bar-spike interesting. It’s a menu bar GitHub Actions monitor. A spike, really, but it does work.

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