Ensure labels exist in a GitHub repository

I wanted to ensure that when this template repository was used to create a new repo that repo would have a specific set of labels.

Here's the workflow I came up with, saved as .github/workflows/ensure_labels.yml:

name: Ensure labels
on: [push]

jobs:
  ensure_labels:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Create labels
      uses: actions/github-script@v6
      with:
        script: |
          try {
            await github.rest.issues.createLabel({
              ...context.repo,
              name: 'captions'
            });
            await github.rest.issues.createLabel({
              ...context.repo,
              name: 'whisper'
            });
          } catch(e) {
            // Ignore if labels exist already
          }

This creates captions and whisper labels, if they do not yet exist.

It's wrapped in a try/catch so that if the labels exist already (as they will on subsequent runs) the error can be ignored.

Note that you need to use await ... inside that try/catch block or exceptions thrown by those methods will still cause the action run to fail.

The ...context.repo trick saves on having to pass owner and repo explicitly.

Created 2022-09-25T11:28:21-07:00, updated 2022-09-25T11:28:53-07:00 · History · Edit

Ensure labels exist in a GitHub repository

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