Add & Commit

You can use this GitHub Action to commit changes made in your workflow run directly to your repo: for example, you use it to lint your code, update documentation, commit updated builds and so on...

This is heavily inspired by git-auto-commit-action (by Stefan Zweifel): that action automatically detects changed files and commits them. While this is useful for most situations, this doesn't commit untracked files and can sometimes commit unintended changes (such as package-lock.json or similar, that may have happened during previous steps).
This action lets you choose the path that you want to use when adding & committing changes, so that it works as you would normally do using git on your machine.

Usage

Add a step like this to your workflow:

- uses: EndBug/add-and-commit@v2 # You can change this to use a specific version
  with:
    # The name of the user that will be displayed as the author of the commit
    # Default: author of the commit that triggered the run
    author_name: Your Name

    # The The email of the user that will be displayed as the author of the commit
    # Default: author of the commit that triggered the run
    author_email: mail@example.com

    # The local path to the directory where your repository is located. You should use actions/checkout first to set it up
    # Default: '.'
    cwd: './path/to/the/repo'

    # The message for the commit
    # Default: 'Commit from GitHub Actions'
    message: 'Your commit message'

    # The path to stage files from
    # Default: '.'
    path: 'src'

    # The pattern that mathces file names
    # Default: '*.*'
    pattern: "*.js"

    # Whether to use the --force option on git add, in order to bypass eventual gitignores
    # Default: false
    force: true
  env:
    # This is necessary in order to push a commit to the repo
    GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} # Leave this line unchanged

Environment variables:

The only env variable required is the token for the action to run: GitHub generates one automatically, but you need to pass it through env to make it available to actions. You can find more about GITHUB_TOKEN here.
With that said, you can just copy the example line and don't worry about it. If you do want to use a different token you can pass that in, but I wouldn't see any possible advantage in doing so.

Deleting files:

This action only adds files so in order to commit a file deletion you need to stage that separately: for that, you can run git rm in a previous step. Here's a quick example:

- run: git rm delete_me.txt

- uses: EndBug/add-and-commit@v2
  with:
    author_name: Your Name
    author_email: mail@example.com
    message: "Remove file"
    path: "."
    pattern: "*.js"  # The path is not important, the file will get removed anyway: that means you can still use the action as usual
    force: true
  env:
    GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Examples:

Do you want to lint your JavaScript files, located in the src folder, with ESLint, so that fixable changes are done without your intervention? You can use a workflow like this:

name: Lint source code
on: push

jobs: 
  run:
    name: Lint with ESLint
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps: 
    - name: Checkout repo
      uses: actions/checkout@v2

    - name: Set up Node.js
      uses: actions/setup-node@v1
      with:
        node-version: 12.x
    
    - name: Install dependencies
      run: npm install

    - name: Update source code
      run: eslint "src/**" --fix

    - name: Commit changes
      uses: EndBug/add-and-commit@v2 
      with:
        author_name: Your Name
        author_email: mail@example.com
        message: "Your commit message"
        path: "."
        pattern: "*.js"
      env:
        GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

If you need to run the action on a repository that is not located in $GITHUB_WORKSPACE, you can use the cwd option: the action uses a cd normal command, so the path should follow bash standards.

name: Use a different repository directory
on: push

jobs: 
  run:
    name: Add a text file
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      # If you need to, you can checkout your repo to a different location
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          path: "./pathToRepo/"

      # You can make whatever type of change to the repo...
      - run: echo "123" > ./pathToRepo/file.txt

      # ...and then use the action as you would normally do, but providing the path to the repo
      - uses: EndBug/add-and-commit@v2
        with:
          message: "Add the very useful text file"
          path: "."
          pattern: "*.txt"
          cwd: "./pathToRepo/"
          force: true
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

License

This action is distributed under the MIT license, check the license for more info.