Let’s talk about GitHub Actions 💬 ✨

[samus-aran]

As we wrap up the past year, we want to take a moment to reflect on everything we’ve built and shipped for GitHub Actions together.

When it comes to GitHub Actions, you’ve told us what improvements matter most: faster builds, better caching, more workflow flexibility, and rock-solid reliability. We heard you.

Across the year, we delivered a number of improvements directly shaped by conversations you started.

Our detailed year-in-review blog post outlines each update in full, but below is a brief summary to give a quick recap of the main highlights.

• YAML anchors: reducing duplication in complex workflows:
  one of the most requested features across both the runners and community repositories. Letting you define configuration settings once with an anchor (&) and reference them elsewhere with an alias (*).

• Non-public workflow templates for consistent CI across teams:
  we released non-public workflow templates, a longstanding request from organizations that want consistent, private workflow scaffolding. Non-public workflow templates let organizations set up common templates for their teams directly in their .github repository.

• Deeper reusable workflows for modular, large-scale pipelines:
  we shipped increases to reusable workflow depth (another key request from the community). Reusable workflows let you break your automation into modular, shareable pieces.

• Larger caches for bigger projects and dependency-heavy builds:
  repositories can now exceed the previous 10GB cache limit that was only possible due to our architecture rework, and fulfills a request from the community, particularly among some of our largest users.

• More workflow dispatch inputs for richer automation:
  increased the number of workflow dispatch inputs from 10 to 25, which also came up in our community discussions.

These are just a few. The full blog post includes additional context, further examples of community impact, and so much more. This space is dedicated to hearing your side of the story.

What’s coming in early 2026

This is just the beginning as there is much we want to do to deliver an even better experience with Actions. Here’s what we’re planning for the first quarter of 2026, influenced by some of the top requests from our community

1. Support for timezones in scheduled jobs and updates to schedule reliability
2. Return the run ID from workflow dispatch
3. Adding a switch function for expressions so they have a conditional operator or function
4. UX improvements including faster page load times, better rendering for workflows with over 300 jobs, and a filter for the jobs list

We’re interested in hearing how you plan to use these upcoming capabilities and which ones you believe will make the biggest impact.

Help us shape the 2026 roadmap for GitHub Actions

We’d love to use this space to really understand what you need and what excites you as we think about the 2026 roadmap for GitHub Actions. This is a chance for us to learn from your experiences, hear what’s working, and explore where we can take things next together.

Share your stories

If any of the updates we highlighted have helped you this year, we’d love to hear your stories. If GitHub Actions is key to your work, share what it’s helped you accomplish. If you have done something with Actions you are proud of, share it with us! The team cares deeply about it, and your feedback and appreciation mean a lot to them.

What you still need

If there’s something you’re still hoping for, we’d love to hear what it is and how it would change the way you work or what it would unlock for you. Feel free to share any discussions that reflect your experience or needs.

Hearing directly from you, our users, keeps us connected to what really matters, and we appreciate you being part of the conversation. We know GitHub Actions powers how developers build software, and the best version is the one we’ll build together.

[StephenCleary]

Adding a switch function for expressions so they have a conditional operator or function

I am very excited about this!