GitHub Actions: Manual triggers with workflow_dispatch

You can now create workflows that are manually triggered with the new workflow_dispatch event.
You will then see a ‘Run workflow’ button on the Actions tab, enabling you to easily trigger a run.
You can choose which branch the workflow is run on.
In addition, you can optionally specify inputs, which GitHub will present as form elements in the UI. Workflow dispatch inputs are specified with the same format as action inputs.

For example:

on: 
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      logLevel:
        description: 'Log level'     
        required: true
        default: 'warning'
      tags:
        description: 'Test scenario tags'  

The triggered workflow receives the inputs in the github.event context.

For example:

jobs:
  printInputs:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - run: |
        echo "Log level: ${{ github.event.inputs.logLevel }}"
        echo "Tags: ${{ github.event.inputs.tags }}" 

If you have any questions or thoughts about these changes, we recommend asking in our GitHub Community Forum’s Actions Board!