GitHub has launched an Actions API, plugging what it described a “key feature” gap its its workflow offering.

A beta programme for the API was announced in a blogpost by GitHub staffer Chris Patterson, who said the first iteration focused on four areas.

First up is reading workflow run and job data, with users now able to query “detailed information such as outcome, conclusion, and timing using the workflow run and job API.” He added, “You can also download the raw logs for each run using the workflow run and job API so you can store them for long term archival or other analysis.”

The Secrets API will also allow secrets management to be automated, and “helps teams with a large volume of repositories implement best practices like secret rotation and it allows partners to write integrations that automatically provision secrets.”

The artifacts API will allow downloading of “an archive of an artifact from a workflow run using the artifacts API for your teams and partners to integrate Actions artifacts into other tools and services.”

The fourth highlight, from GitHub’s point of view, is making it easier for users to run Actions on their own hardware, with self-hosted runners, by automating the registration and removal of runners by creating registration tokens and passing them to the runner configuration script.

There is one fly in the ointment. While the new API is available with most GitHub plans, the vendor warns, “GitHub Actions is not available for repositories owned by accounts using legacy per-repository plans.”

Meanwhile, GitHub has made it easier to connect issues and pull requests, with a linked pull request feature. GitHub’s Lauren Brose wrote that the feature means, “anyone that views the issue can immediately see the status of development work on the issue and the state of the associated pull request.”