Plural Workbench Follow-up

A shared GitHub Action that sends a follow-up prompt to the Plural Workbench associated with a merged pull request after your delivery workflow builds and deploys the change. It wraps:

plural workbenches pr-followup

Plural is GitOps-based, so the intended workflow runs after the pull request is merged into the deployment branch. This lets the Workbench verify the reconciled system and infrastructure state rather than infer the outcome only from files changed in the pull request.

Usage

A common pattern is to invoke this action after the same workflow builds a Docker image and deploys the application. Run it when a pull request is closed, and guard the job with github.event.pull_request.merged == true so it never runs for an open or unmerged pull request. Use pluralsh/setup-plural to install the Plural CLI and configure Console authentication before invoking this action:

name: Build, deploy, and verify merged changes

on:
  pull_request:
    types: [closed]

permissions:
  contents: read
  id-token: write

jobs:
  deploy-and-follow-up:
    if: github.event.pull_request.merged == true
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Build Docker image
        run: |
          docker build -t ghcr.io/acme/example:${{ github.sha }} .
          docker push ghcr.io/acme/example:${{ github.sha }}

      - name: Deploy application
        run: ./scripts/deploy.sh ghcr.io/acme/example:${{ github.sha }}

      - name: Set up Plural
        uses: pluralsh/setup-plural@v2
        with:
          consoleUrl: ${{ vars.PLURAL_CONSOLE_URL }}
          email: ${{ vars.PLURAL_CONSOLE_EMAIL }}
          vsn: 0.12.60

      - name: Verify deployed changes
        id: follow-up
        uses: pluralsh/workbench-followup-action@v1
        with:
          prompt: |
            Pull request #${{ github.event.pull_request.number }} was merged into ${{ github.event.pull_request.base.ref }}.
            The Docker image was built and the application was deployed.
            Verify the live deployment, confirm the expected change is working, and fix any issues you find.
          url: ${{ github.event.pull_request.html_url }}
          defer: 5m
          skip-missing: true

      - name: Print Workbench job
        if: steps.follow-up.outputs.skipped != 'true'
        run: echo '${{ steps.follow-up.outputs.workbench-job-url }}'

Replace the example build and deploy commands with the steps your delivery pipeline already uses. Adjust defer to allow enough time for deployment and GitOps reconciliation to complete before the Workbench starts verification.

Authentication

pluralsh/setup-plural adds the selected CLI release to PATH and exports PLURAL_CONSOLE_URL and PLURAL_CONSOLE_TOKEN to subsequent steps in the same job. Configure it using either federated credentials or a Console token.

Federated credentials

The complete workflow above uses consoleUrl and email. With a matching Plural federated credential, setup-plural exchanges the workflow's GitHub OIDC token for a Console access token. This method does not require a Console token secret, but the workflow must grant id-token: write:

permissions:
  contents: read
  id-token: write

steps:
  - name: Set up Plural
    uses: pluralsh/setup-plural@v2
    with:
      consoleUrl: ${{ vars.PLURAL_CONSOLE_URL }}
      email: ${{ vars.PLURAL_CONSOLE_EMAIL }}
      vsn: 0.12.60

Console token

Alternatively, store a Console token as a GitHub Actions secret and pass it directly to setup-plural. This method does not require id-token: write:

permissions:
  contents: read

steps:
  - name: Set up Plural
    uses: pluralsh/setup-plural@v2
    with:
      consoleUrl: ${{ vars.PLURAL_CONSOLE_URL }}
      consoleToken: ${{ secrets.PLURAL_CONSOLE_TOKEN }}
      vsn: 0.12.60

In either configuration, this action receives the Console URL and token through the environment and does not accept or require them as inputs.

The action does not check the pull request state itself. The workflow must ensure the pull request was merged; the recommended pull_request: closed trigger and github.event.pull_request.merged == true job condition above provide that guarantee. Do not invoke the action from workflows for open pull requests.

When url and commit are omitted, the action uses github.event.pull_request.html_url. This allows the explicit url line in the recommended merged-pull-request workflow to be omitted:

- name: Verify merged changes
  uses: pluralsh/workbench-followup-action@v1
  with:
    prompt: |
      Pull request #${{ github.event.pull_request.number }} was merged into ${{ github.event.pull_request.base.ref }}.
      Verify the merged changes against the reconciled system and infrastructure state.
    defer: 5m

For a post-merge workflow triggered by a push to the deployment branch, commit can instead identify the merged pull request from the checked-out commit subject. Check out the repository with full history first:

- uses: actions/checkout@v4
  with:
    fetch-depth: 0

- name: Verify merged changes
  uses: pluralsh/workbench-followup-action@v1
  with:
    prompt: Verify the merged changes against the reconciled system and infrastructure state.
    commit: HEAD
    provider: github

You can combine base-url with provider in that post-merge commit workflow when the Git remote cannot provide the desired web URL:

- name: Verify merged changes
  uses: pluralsh/workbench-followup-action@v1
  with:
    prompt: Verify the merged changes against the reconciled system and infrastructure state.
    commit: HEAD
    base-url: https://github.example.com/acme/example
    provider: github

Inputs

Input	Required	Default	Description
prompt	Yes	—	Follow-up prompt sent to the Workbench.
url	No	Event PR URL	Explicit merged pull request URL. When omitted without commit, uses github.event.pull_request.html_url; otherwise the CLI performs inference.
commit	No	HEAD	Commit or ref whose subject identifies the pull request when URL is omitted.
base-url	No	Origin web URL	Repository web URL used to construct the pull request URL.
provider	No	auto	Source control provider: auto, github, gitlab, or bitbucket.
defer	No	0s	Duration to defer the follow-up, such as 30s, 5m, or 2h.
output	No	json	CLI output format: raw or json. Structured action outputs are only populated with json.
skip-missing	No	false	Exit successfully if no Workbench job is associated with the pull request.

Outputs

Output	Description
prompt-id	ID of the created follow-up prompt. Empty when skipped.
pull-request-url	Pull request URL used by the command.
workbench-job-url	URL of the associated Workbench job. Empty when skipped.
skipped	true when no associated Workbench job was found and skip-missing was enabled.

The outputs above are parsed from the CLI's JSON response. With output: raw, the CLI writes its human-readable result directly to the job log and action outputs are empty because raw output does not expose structured result or skip state.

Requirements

• A GitHub Actions runner with Bash, Git, and jq.
• pluralsh/setup-plural@v2 run earlier in the same job with CLI version 0.12.60 or newer.
• Access to the target Plural Console.
• One of these setup-plural authentication configurations:
  • Federated credentials: consoleUrl and email, a matching Plural federated credential, and workflow permission id-token: write.
  • Console token: consoleUrl and consoleToken, typically read from a GitHub Actions variable and secret; no OIDC permission is required.
• actions/checkout with sufficient history before this action when using commit-based pull request inference.

Logging

The action is designed to keep workflow logs human-readable:

• The composite step runs a checked-in entrypoint script instead of inlining the full shell program in workflow logs.
• It emits progress notices before submission, on skip, and on success.
• In output: json mode, it prints a short success summary and still exposes structured outputs for downstream steps.
• In output: raw mode, it streams the CLI's human-readable output directly.

Development

Validate the action metadata with actionlint:

actionlint action.yml .github/workflows/ci.yml