The GitHub Actions extension lets you manage your workflows, view the workflow run history, and helps with authoring workflows.
- Manage your workflows and runs without leaving your editor.
- Keep track of your CI builds and deployments.
- Investigate failures and view logs.
Be more confident when authoring and modifying workflows. Find errors before committing workflows with:
Syntax highlighting for workflows and GitHub Actions Expressions makes it clear where values are inserted at execution time:
Integrated documentation for the workflow schema, expression functions, and even event payloads:
Validation and code completion for the YAML schema and GitHub Actions Expressions. Get instant validation and code completion for the workflow schema, expression functions, event payloads, and job or step outputs:
Smart validation and code completion for actions and reusable workflows: the extension automatically parses parameters, inputs, and outputs for referenced actions and called reusable workflows for code-completion and validation.
- Install the extension from the Marketplace.
- Sign in with your GitHub account and when prompted allow
GitHub Actionsaccess to your GitHub account. - Open a GitHub repository.
- You will be able to utilize the syntax features in Workflow files, and you can find the GitHub Actions icon on the left navigation to manage your Workflows.
graph LR
subgraph "User Interface"
WF[Workflows View]
CB[Current Branch View]
SET[Settings View]
EDITOR[Workflow Editor]
end
subgraph "Core Features"
AUTH[Authentication]
MANAGE[Workflow Management]
LOGS[Log Viewing]
VALID[Validation & Completion]
end
subgraph "Data Management"
STORE[Run Store]
SECRETS[Secrets/Variables]
PIN[Pinned Workflows]
end
WF --> MANAGE
WF --> PIN
CB --> MANAGE
SET --> SECRETS
EDITOR --> VALID
MANAGE --> STORE
MANAGE --> AUTH
LOGS --> STORE
VALID --> AUTH
SECRETS --> AUTH
PIN --> MANAGE
style AUTH fill:#fd8c73
style MANAGE fill:#58a6ff
style VALID fill:#3fb950
- Manage your workflows and runs
- Edit workflows (syntax highlighting, auto-completion, hovering, and validation)
- Keep track of your CI builds and deployments
- Investigate failures and view logs
- Modify settings like Environments, Secrets, and Variables
Unfortunately, at this time we are not able to support the extension with remote repositories (including github.dev and vscode.dev), so please use the extension with locally downloaded GitHub repositories for the best experience. Please check back here for updates in the future!
We have enabled experimental functionality to support GitHub Enterprise Server, but this feature is an experimental beta and currently unsupported. To try this out, enable the use-enterprise setting to authenticate with your GitHub Enterprise Server Authentication Provider settings

We currently do not have the capability to support Operating System (OS) certificates or enterprise proxies (we plan to support pulling from the VS Code proxy settings), but we have plans for it in the future and it is on our backlog!
graph TB
subgraph "VS Code Extension"
EXT[Extension Host]
TV[Tree Views]
CMD[Commands]
TRACK[Workspace Tracker]
end
subgraph "Language Support"
LC[Language Client]
LS[Language Server]
WP[Workflow Parser]
EE[Expression Engine]
end
subgraph "External Services"
GH[GitHub API]
REPO[Git Repository]
end
EXT --> LC
EXT --> TV
EXT --> CMD
EXT --> TRACK
LC <--> LS
LS --> WP
LS --> EE
WP --> EE
TV --> GH
CMD --> GH
TRACK --> REPO
LS --> GH
style EXT fill:#2ea44f
style LS fill:#0969da
style GH fill:#8250df
See CONTRIBUTING.md. A description of the architecture of the extension can be found here.
This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT open source license. Please refer to MIT for the full terms.





