How to get my own GitHub events payload json for testing GitHub Actions locally?

Question

I use GitHub Actions and want to test it locally. I'm using this tool and it works fine. https://github.com/nektos/act

I can provide a event.json for local testing, but it's really hard to create a real event payload.

Is there any way to get real event payload? For example, I create pull request on my repository from the console, and get that event payload json.

Answer 1

To get event data, you can use a GitHub action to print the event to the log.

# change this to the event type you want to get the data for
on:
  pull_request:
    types: [opened, closed, reopened]

jobs:
  printJob:    
    name: Print event
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - name: Dump GitHub context
      env:
        GITHUB_CONTEXT: ${{ toJson(github) }}
      run: |
        echo "$GITHUB_CONTEXT"

Alternatively, you can find example event data in the documentation: https://docs.github.com/en/developers/webhooks-and-events/webhook-events-and-payloads#webhook-payload-example-30