gh Commenter

Atomatically posts comments on specified Issues or Pull Requests (PRs) in your repository.

This GitHub Action is useful for teams who want to programmatically add comments to Issues or Pull Requests, which is essential for CI/CD status reporting, automated code review feedback, and bot communication via webhooks.

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✨ Features

• Automated Commenting: A core feature to post messages on Issues or Pull Requests directly from a workflow.
• Simple Integration: One-step usage in any workflow.
• Powered by GitHub CLI: Uses the official GitHub CLI for secure Issue and Pull Request comment management.
• Organization-wide: Can be used across any repository.

🛠️ Usage

1. Prerequisites

• Your workflow must pass the necessary inputs to this action.
• This action expects the GitHub CLI (gh) to be available (it is pre-installed on all GitHub-hosted runners).
• The environment variable GH_TOKEN must be set to a valid GitHub token with the required write permissions, typically repo and specific permissions like pull_requests or issues. (by default, ${{ github.token }} will suffice for most repositories).

2. Example Workflow Integration

name: Test GH Commenter Action

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      kind_id:
        description: 'Issue or Pull Request ID or URL for commenting (e.g., 1)'
        required: true
        default: '1'
      message:
        description: 'Test comment content'
        required: true
        default: 'This is an automated test comment.'

jobs:
  comment_test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    
    # IMPORTANT: You must configure the GITHUB_TOKEN to have write permissions on Issues/PRs.
    permissions:
      issues: write
      pull-requests: write

    steps:
      - name: Use GH Commenter Action
        uses: ws2git/gh-commenter-action@v1 
        id: commenter
        env:
          GH_TOKEN: ${{ github.token }}
        with:
          # Reference type: issue or pr
          ref_kind: 'pr'
          # Kind ID (using workflow input)
          identifier: ${{ github.event.inputs.kind_id }}
          # Message content (using workflow input)
          message_content: ${{ github.event.inputs.message }}

      - name: Show Completion Message
        run: |
          echo "Status do Comentário: ${{ steps.commenter.outputs.completion-message }}"

📥 Inputs

Name	Required	Description
ref_kind	Yes	The type of reference to comment on: must be issue or pr.
identifier	Yes	The Issue/PR identifier: number (e.g., 123) or full URL (e.g., ${{ github.event.pull_request.html_url }}).
message_content	No	The comment message body. Note: If not provided, the script will exit with an error because the underlying gh command requires content.

⚙️ How It Works

Internally, this action calls a shell script that uses the GitHub CLI to post a new comment on the specified Issue or Pull Request.

Script logic:

# **ADJUST THE GH COMMAND HERE**
# Generic example:
gh "${REF_KIND}" comment "${IDENTIFIER}" --body "${MESSAGE_CONTENT}"

The script first validates that ref_kind is either 'pr' or 'issue'. If the message_content or other required parameters are missing, or if the gh command fails (e.g., due to insufficient permissions), the script exits with an error and exports a failure message.

🛡️ Security and Authentication

This Action uses the GitHub CLI (gh) to perform comment operations, and gh requires the authentication token to be provided through the environment variable GH_TOKEN.

Recommended: For most operations (in the current repository), use the default token ${{ github.token }}. This is temporary and has limited permissions, which minimizes security risk. You will need to ensure the appropriate write permissions are set in the job (e.g., pull-requests: write or issues: write).

env:
GH_TOKEN: ${{ github.token }}

Advanced Operations/External Repositories: If you need elevated permissions or access to external repositories (outside the workflow context), pass a PAT (Personal Access Token) stored as a Secret:

env:
GH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.MY_PAT_SECRET }}

Never expose the PAT in plain text.

📌 Notes

⚠️ Attention: Permissions Configuration

It is crucial to set the correct permissions in your workflow job.

• To comment on Pull Requests, you must set pull-requests: write.
• To comment on Issues, you must set issues: write.
• The Action will fail with a permission error if the provided GH_TOKEN does not have the necessary scope to post the comment.

🔗 Related Documentation

• GitHub Actions Contexts
• GitHub CLI gh pr comment command
• GitHub CLI gh issue comment command

❓ Support

If you find a bug or have a question, open an issue.