Feature request: Lock remote reusable workflow calls (jobs.<id>.uses)

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Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
github-actions, go
Domain
ci-cd, cli

Research direction

Start in ExtractActionRefs, where job-level uses: values go to parserlock.ParseActionRef, which returns nil for .github/workflows/ paths and drops them silently. Check whether ParseReusableWorkflowRef in the actions-lockfile dependency can supply the owner, repo, path and ref. Done means either the reusable call is resolved and locked, or --verify reports it as unlocked. The maintainer closed #129 against this, so confirm the approach with them first.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

area:docs area:reusable-workflows bug feature-request

Summary

gh actions-lock does not lock remote reusable workflow calls (jobs.<id>.uses: owner/repo/.github/workflows/<file>.yml@ref). It skips them without a finding, so a workflow whose only external ref is a reusable workflow is recorded as [] and --verify passes.

The lockfile docs say a lockfile pins "every action (including transitive dependencies) and reusable workflow your workflows depend on". The CLI does not do this at the moment.

Based on this comment https://github.com/github/gh-actions-lock/issues/129#issuecomment-6195549413 there seems to be no immediate plan to support this, but I think it is still valuable to track this. As the activity stream of that PR shows quite an interest of the community for such a feature.

This part is generated by Opus 5.5 based on the debugging session I had with it:

Reproduction

gh actions-lock v0.2.0, with this workflow:

# .github/workflows/osv.yml
on: pull_request
jobs:
  scan-pr:
    uses: google/osv-scanner-action/.github/workflows/[email protected]

$ gh actions-lock --no-interactive
$ gh actions-lock --verify
All N workflows valid

# .github/workflows/actions.lock
workflows:
    .github/workflows/osv.yml: []

Expected: the call is resolved and locked like a step-level action, e.g. google/[email protected] with its commit SHA. Alternatively, --verify reports it as unlocked.

Actual: the ref is dropped and the tag stays unpinned with no warning.

Cause

ExtractActionRefs passes job-level uses: values to parserlock.ParseActionRef, which returns nil for any path under .github/workflows/. The nil result is discarded. actions-lockfile already provides ParseReusableWorkflowRef, but gh-actions-lock does not call it.

Why it matters

  • Teams moving to the lockfile change step refs to tags and let the lockfile hold the SHAs. Reusable workflow calls cannot follow that pattern, so they must stay SHA-pinned in YAML. Workflows then mix two pinning styles, and tools such as Renovate, Dependabot and zizmor need different rules for each.
  • If someone converts a reusable workflow call to a tag, assuming the lockfile covers it, nothing pins it. --verify still passes, so the gap is not visible, even though it is documented.

Request

Please lock remote reusable workflow refs at job level, resolved to the commit of the repository that defines them. Their own action dependencies would stay covered by that repository's lockfile, as the docs describe. If this is out of scope, --verify and --no-fix should at least emit a finding for unlocked job-level refs, and the README Limitations section should mention it.

Related

  • #129: closed with "we don't plan to pin job-level uses at this time"
  • #161: open community PR, "Track reusable workflow calls in lock coverage"
  • #169: SHA-pinning policy and reusable workflows (fixed on the backend)
Dominant language
Go
Stars
253
Forks
15
Avg merge
19h 30m
Merged PRs (30d)
60

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