GitHub Actions: trigger a workflow_dispatch workflow from another workflow

1 min readgit, github, actions

Let’s say you have your deploy pipeline set as a GitHub Action workflow, which is triggered manually (using the workflow_dispatch event) and allows you to select to which environment you want to deploy.

On certain occasions you might be interested in deploying to all environments. Instead of having to manually trigger the pipeline for each environment, you could create a new workflow and use the action benc-uk/workflow-dispatch, allowing you to trigger this workflow only once and deploy to all environments, as such:

name: Deploy to all environments pipeline


on:
  workflow_dispatch:


jobs:
  deploy:
    name: "Deploy to all environments"
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Invoke Deploy pipeline workflow for dev
        uses: benc-uk/workflow-dispatch@v1
        with:
          workflow: deploy-pipeline.yaml
          inputs: '{ "environment": "dev" }'
      - name: Invoke Deploy pipeline workflow for staging
        uses: benc-uk/workflow-dispatch@v1
        with:
          workflow: deploy-pipeline.yaml
          inputs: '{ "environment": "staging" }'
      - name: Invoke Deploy pipeline workflow for production
        uses: benc-uk/workflow-dispatch@v1
        with:
          workflow: deploy-pipeline.yaml
          inputs: '{ "environment": "production" }'

Another cool thing about this action is that it your workflows will run in parallel, since they’re triggered behind-the-scenes via REST API calls.