ASF Allowlist Check

A composite GitHub Action that verifies all uses: refs in a project's workflow files are on the ASF Infrastructure approved allowlist. Catches violations before merge, preventing the silent CI failures that occur when an action is not on the org-level allowlist (see #574).

Why

When a GitHub Actions workflow references an action that isn't on the ASF org-level allowlist, the CI job silently fails with “Startup failure” — no logs, no notifications, and the PR may appear green because no checks ran. This action catches those problems at PR time with a clear error message.

Usage

Add a workflow file to your project (e.g., .github/workflows/asf-allowlist-check.yml):

name: "ASF Allowlist Check"

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  pull_request:
    paths:
      - ".github/**"
  push:
    branches:
      - main
    paths:
      - ".github/**"

permissions:
  contents: read

jobs:
  asf-allowlist-check:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          persist-credentials: false
      - uses: apache/infrastructure-actions/allowlist-check@main

That's it — two steps. The actions/checkout step checks out your repo so .github/ is available to scan, then the allowlist check runs against those files.

Inputs

Custom scan glob

To scan only workflow files (excluding other YAML under .github/):

- uses: apache/infrastructure-actions/allowlist-check@main
  with:
    scan-glob: ".github/workflows/*.yml"

What it checks

The action scans all matching YAML files for uses: keys and validates each action ref against the approved_patterns.yml allowlist.

Automatically allowed

Actions from these GitHub organizations are implicitly trusted and don't need to be in the allowlist:

• actions/* — GitHub's official actions
• github/* — GitHub's own actions
• apache/* — ASF's own actions

Skipped

• Local refs (./) — paths within the same repo are not subject to the org allowlist
• Docker refs (docker://) — container actions pulled directly from a registry
• Empty YAML files — skipped
• Malformed YAML files — fails with an error

Violation output

When violations are found, the action fails with exit code 1 and prints:

::error::Found 2 action ref(s) not on the ASF allowlist:
::error file=.github/workflows/ci.yml::some-org/some-action@v1 is not on the ASF allowlist
::error file=.github/workflows/release.yml::other-org/other-action@abc123 is not on the ASF allowlist

To resolve a violation, open a PR in this repo to add the action or add a new version to the allowlist.

When all refs pass:

All 15 unique action refs are on the ASF allowlist

Expiry warnings

Approved versions of an action don't live forever: when a newer version is approved, older pinned SHAs are given an expires_at date (a grace period, typically three months) and are eventually removed from the allowlist. Once a pin is removed, workflows still using it start failing the allowlist check.

To give projects advance notice, the action also fetches actions.yml (which carries the expires_at metadata) and emits a non-failing ::warning:: for any allowlisted pin in your workflows that expires within expiry-warning-days (default 30):

1 allowlisted ref(s) expiring within 30 day(s) -- bump these to a newer approved version before they are removed:
::warning file=.github/workflows/ci.yml::some-org/some-action@abc123 is allowlisted but its approved pin expires on 2026-07-25 (in 12 day(s)); bump to a newer approved version to avoid a future CI failure.

Warnings never change the exit code — they surface in the job log and the PR “Files changed” annotations so you can bump the pin before it breaks. This is best-effort: if actions.yml can't be fetched, the check still runs, just without expiry warnings.

- uses: apache/infrastructure-actions/allowlist-check@main
  with:
    expiry-warning-days: "60"   # start warning two months ahead

Dependencies

• Python 3 (pre-installed on GitHub-hosted runners)
• ruyaml (installed automatically by the action)