Github Actions Versioning

TIL: When using un-pinned versions you must use @v. When using pinned patch versions use the exact release tag @, which may or may not have a v prefix

Case in point, at work we decided to migrate from un-pinned versions to pinned versions of all our Github actions.

One of the Github actions we use is: https://github.com/ravsamhq/notify-slack-action

It’s latest release tag at the time of writing is 2.5.0

Other Github actions like the famous checkout use a release tag like v4.2.1 (note the v prefix)

Originally, we used the notify-slack-action using its major version only as in:

- uses: ravsamhq/notify-slack-action@2

When I pinned the version I changed it to:

- uses: ravsamhq/notify-slack-action@v2.5.0 

That resulted in the error:

Prepare all required actions
Getting action download info
Error: Unable to resolve action `ravsamhq/notify-slack-action@v2.5.0`, unable to find version `v2.5.0`

The corresponding change to actions/checkout worked like a charm:

actions/checkout@v4 -> actions/checkout@v4.1.2

I was a little surprised, but then I check the actual release tags and noticed the discrepancy where actions/checkout includes the v prefix in its tags.

The fix was simply to drop the v prefix from the pinned version of ravsamhq/notify-slack-actio:

uses: ravsamhq/notify-slack-action@2.5.0

This inconsistency of using the v prefix between pinned and un-pinned version is pretty odd.