How to get the type of a trigger event as a variable In GitHub Actions

In GitHub Actions, you can use the github context to retrieve the type of the triggering event for the current workflow. The github context contains detailed information about the workflow and triggering events. Specifically, the github.event_name property can be used to retrieve the name of the event that triggered the current workflow.

For example, if you want to perform different actions based on different triggering events, you can use this variable to perform conditional checks within the workflow steps. Here is a practical example:

yaml
name: Example Workflow
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - master

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Check out repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Print event name
        run: echo "The event that triggered this workflow is ${{ github.event_name }}"

      - name: Execute command based on event
        run: |
          if [ "${{ github.event_name }}" = "push" ]; then
            echo "This was triggered by a push event"
          elif [ "${{ github.event_name }}" = "pull_request" ]; then
            echo "This was triggered by a pull_request event"
          else
            echo "This was triggered by some other events"
          fi

In this example:

• The workflow is triggered by push and pull_request events.
• One step uses github.event_name to print the type of the triggering event.
• The subsequent steps execute different commands based on the type of the triggering event.

By doing this, you can flexibly handle different events in GitHub Actions and execute specific workflow logic based on the event type.