Workflow Dispatch - Manual Triggering of Workflows

This is the simplest example here, and is really only included because the naming is a bit weird. A workflow_dispatch trigger is a manual trigger--the easiest way to manually kick off a workflow from the GitHub interface.

After adding the workflow_dispatch trigger to your workflow, trigger your workflow by navigating to:

• Your GitHub Repository main page
• Click the "Actions" tab
• On the left bar, select the name of your workflow
• On the right side, there is a button Run workflow that allows you to trigger your workflow.

Additional Inputs

If you want to get even more enlightened, check out other options that go along with workflow_dispatch, such as adding inputs in the GitHub documentation.

A great thing to note is that there is a default dropdown that appears, allowing you to select the branch to run from. GitHub Actions only knows about workflows that exist in the default branch. So if you're developing a new workflow on a feature branch and you want to manually trigger it, you'll find that the workflow doesn't show up on the Actions page!

There are a couple ways around this:

• Change the default branch to the feature branch you are working on
• Start by creating a very simple workflow, similar to the example below, and getting that merged into your default branch, before actually developing the workflow

We generally prefer the second option. Once the simple "Hello World" workflow is on the default branch, you can continue developing on your feature branch use the workflow_dispatch to trigger your updated code on the feature branch whenever you want using the dropdown!

Example

Check this workflow out for an example of creating a workflow_dispatch.