Feature Request: allow to trigger workflows from a PR's checks section

[gmazzo]

🏷️ Discussion Type

Product Feedback

💬 Feature/Topic Area

Workflow Deployment

Discussion Details

Introduce a way to allow workflows to be triggered (like workflow_dispatch) by user interaction, but bound into a pull_request context.

As a DX provider, we'll like to enable "optional" actions to our users (developers) to trigger when then open PRs.

Currently we rely on some UX hacks to support it, i.e.:

• Asking the developer to label the PR with an specific label
• Manually dispatch the workflow and enter the PR number as an input
• Using a 3rd party app (and its backend) to provide a check with an action, later to be processed by web-hook that will endup calling workflow_dispatch.

This UX is far from ideal, we'll look forward on something more similar to Update branch button: offered in the PR's Checks/Status as an action button, that will trigger the workflow:

Proposal

Introduce a new pull_request: action_dispatch DSL:

name: Reformat Code
on:
  pull_request: action_dispatch

When defined, the PR's check section will show something like this:

When the user hits the button, the workflow will be triggered with a pull_request context.

Optionally, we can extend the configuration to allow customising the visuals:

name: Reformat Code
on:
  pull_request:
    types: [ action_dispatch ]
    dispatch:
      label: Run workflow
      description: Updated the code by appling code-formatting rules to it