Clarify 'description' key is optional for composite actions
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Assessment
- Difficulty
- 1/5
- Estimated time
- Under an hour
- Newbie friendliness
- 25/100
- Issue type
- Documentation
- Clarity
- Clearly specified
- Activity status
- Stale
- Tech stack
- github-actions
- Domain
- documentation
Research direction
Start with the metadata syntax article at docs.github.com/en/actions/reference/workflows-and-actions/metadata-syntax and review the linked pull request for the proposed wording. Update the composite-action description requirement to reflect that it is optional while noting that it is highly recommended, then verify the article renders correctly.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Description
Code of Conduct
- I have read and agree to the GitHub Docs project's Code of Conduct
What article on docs.github.com is affected?
https://docs.github.com/en/actions/reference/workflows-and-actions/metadata-syntax
What part(s) of the article would you like to see updated?
For composite actions, the description key is not strictly required in the action.yml for the composite action to function correctly (see Additional Information for proof).
Instead of Required this should either have an addendum like in the pull request (that is, that description is not required for composite actions, or change Required to optional. In either case, it is probably worth it to state that a description key is highly recommended.
Additional information
I just ran a workflow run that calls a composite action whose action.yml file did not include a description key at the time this workflow ran. The workflow ran as expected (all the composite action does is produce an output that gets passed to the calling workflow).
See https://github.com/mcummings128/gh-actions-outputs-experiments-1/actions/runs/24743176941 for details.
This commit SHA shows the description key was removed from the composite action during the time the workflow ran.
https://github.com/mcummings128/gh-actions-outputs-experiments-1/commit/6037d82f9910c7d186845393ab2b4a53617b2bde
Lastly, please see the pull request this is linked to: https://github.com/github/docs/pull/43911
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