Show HN: Actionate – GitHub Actions for JetBrains IDEs
github.comI’m excited to share Actionate, a passion project my team and I have been building to reimagine GitHub Actions within JetBrains IDEs. We’ve spent over a decade working in innovation labs at major tech companies, but our true passion lies in crafting tools that we genuinely want to use every day.
With Actionate, we’re not just integrating CI/CD into JetBrains; we’re leveraging the powerful building blocks provided by JetBrains and GitHub Actions to create new, transformative functionality. Our MVP (Minimum Viable Product) focuses on the most essential features we find critical for a smoother workflow, but the goal is to push beyond typical CI/CD boundaries and empower developers in ways that haven’t been possible before.
If this vision resonates with you, we’d love for you to check out Actionate and let us know what you think—good or bad. We thrive on community input, and your feedback will shape our roadmap as we continue expanding on what’s possible inside the IDE.
Thanks for reading, and I hope Actionate helps you take your GitHub Actions workflow to the next level!
A lot of big words in the summary (reimagine, crafting tools, transformative functionality, smoother workflow, push beyond typical CI/CD boundaries, empower developers, ...) and still, with that summary I have no clue what exactly this thing does.
Context: I am very familiar with several JetBrains IDEs and CI/CD in general, and a bit with GitHub Actions.
Please, can someone describe in a couple of sentences what this actually does?
I searched Actionate in the Goland and Pycharm plugins Marketplace and can’t find it.
Edit: Nevermind, this this looks to be a deficiency of the Jetbrains search. It seems it would rank similar results like “GitHub Actions Manager” with a lot of downloads (280k) over an exact match like “Actionate” with 10 downloads.
If you scroll down to the 11th result for “Actionate” you will find it.
Thanks for pointing that out! It seems this issue is related to how the in-IDE plugin marketplace search is implemented. For some reason, searching for "Actionate" doesn't return the expected result, but if you search for "Actionat" (without the final "e"), the plugin does show up.
(example here: https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/0427c04b-c941-430...)
We’re looking into this and will reach out to JetBrains to better understand the search behavior. In the meantime, you can also find Actionate directly on the JetBrains Marketplace.
Thanks again for bringing this to our attention—we really appreciate it!
Hah, that is interesting. What a frustrating quirk/bug with the search.
Thanks so much for all the awesome feedback we've received so far! We've taken your suggestions to heart and have added a "Coming Soon" section to our documentation to share some of the exciting features we're working on. Special shoutout to Arbortheus!
We'd love to keep hearing from you! Your feedback helps us prioritize what matters most.
Check out the new section here: https://github.com/revenate/actionate?tab=readme-ov-file#-co...
What’s the value prop of your tool? I can’t tell from either your description or the README. Is it GitHub Actions UI integration inside JetBrains IDEs? Is there more that I’m missing?
Thanks for your question!
Our MVP release focuses on bringing most, if not all, GitHub Actions functionality directly into JetBrains IDEs, allowing users to manage their workflows without leaving their development environment. The primary value here is reduced context switching, leading to increased productivity and uninterrupted focus—something we as developers deeply appreciate.
That said, this is just the beginning. Our long-term vision goes beyond simple UI integration—we aim to introduce features that expand what's possible with GitHub Actions, such as the ability to run actions locally or seamlessly set up your local machine as a GitHub self-hosted runner. This would allow developers to test workflows for free during development, using the same setup they rely on in production.
And that's just one example! We have plenty more ideas and would love to hear from the community about what features would make GitHub Actions even more powerful inside JetBrains IDEs.
We’re excited about the journey ahead and appreciate your feedback!
Is this just for running and managing github actions?
I was actually thinking this was going to help for developing github actions? Like, autocomplete, syntax checking, linting, etc.
You're absolutely right—right now, Actionate focuses on running and managing GitHub Actions within the IDE. We chose this initial feature set as a foundation to build more advanced capabilities, like the ones you're describing. Our goal was to get an early version out to gather feedback from users like you, so we can prioritize features that truly matter rather than relying solely on our assumptions.
The next major feature we're working on is the ability to manage Actions Environments, Variables, and Secrets directly from the IDE. Not only will you be able to manage these values effortlessly, but Actionate will also provide intelligent auto-complete for workflow files by leveraging this data. No more worrying about fat-fingering a hardcoded string again—Actionate will offer native IDE suggestions for environments, variables, and secrets, all based on the currently set environment in your workflow file.
We have several other exciting features in the pipeline and can't wait to bring them to life. Your feedback is incredibly valuable in helping us decide what to prioritize next—so please keep it coming!
Ooooo this looks cool!
Gotta admit though, I work primarily in GitLab. Would love to see this there!
Hope all of your GitHub users enjoy it!
Thank you so much for your interest! We’ve definitely thought about supporting multiple CI providers, including GitLab, and your feedback helps us prioritize future features. We truly appreciate it and will keep it in mind as we continue to grow. Thanks again for your support!
I have some first-impressions feedback after playing with it for ~15 mins:
1. Setup was super easy. Aside from Goland/Pycharm marketplace search weirdness, I was up and running in ~30 seconds.
2. The branch dropdown is a little crazy in some of our repos. We don't have very good branch hygiene, so have hundreds/thousands of branches in the dropdown. I'm unsure how easy of a feature request this is, but it would be nice to order the repos by activity (e.g. most recently committed branch first).
For now, filtering them by my own GitHub user was a fine workaround, as it's then easy to find the workflow run as those /are/ ordered by most recent first.
3. I found a potential bug in the grouping of pipeline step logs. For context, I have a multi-step pipeline. For the first few steps the logs appear on the correct step, but after a specific step the logs appear in the n+1 step's place.
The incorrect indexing seems to be caused by a step that invokes another action via the `uses` block. It looks like this:
The first part of the logs stating "Run Setup foo" appear in the correct step, but the logs from the "./.github/actions/foo" action appear in the logs for the "Build bar" step incorrectly, and the /actual/ logs from "Build bar" appear in the logs for "Run baz" (so all the logs appear in place of the next step's logs, I guess because the indexes are messed up).4. If I expand a pipeline's logs with a lot of lines (~67,000 lines) it crashes the extension. (In fairness, in the GitHub actions web UI it says "This step has been truncated due to its large size. Download the full logs from the menu once the workflow run has completed." - so it is a bit excessive.)
Specifically, when I expanded a pipeline step's logs and got "Oops! Something went wrong. We encountered an unexpected error. Try reloading to reset and continue." - when I hit reload it did fix the application, but it loaded the "home" page rather than the pipeline page I was on, and removed all the branch/user filters I had previously entered - it would be nice if these got preserved even if the extension crashes.
If I reopen that same pipeline step's logs I can reliably reproduce this breaking the application every time (tried 3 times).
5. The pipeline logs don't correctly handle symbols and color codes. For example, I have a log that says " YN0000: Successfully set npmRegistries["<REDACTED>"] to undefined", and the "undefined" text appears in grey on the web UI. (I believe the "undefined" comes from GitHub Actions' automatic scrubbing of secrets from the logs.)
In the plugin this log appears as: `[39m YN0000: Successfully set npmRegistries["<REDACTED>"] to [90mundefined`
6. No search functionality or scroll bar on step logs. Suppose my test fails in CI and the result is right at the bottom of 70,000 lines of test logs, I need to be able to easily find that for this plugin to be helpful.
7. After installing the plugin and connecting my GitHub account, I got an error: "The plugin io.revenate.actionate failed to save settings. Please restart GoLand". However, I think it was a false-positive, because the extension is working just fine without a restart!
Thank you so much for your feedback—it’s truly valuable to us. We do our best to test thoroughly before releasing, but we know we can’t anticipate every scenario. The issues you’ve highlighted are extremely helpful, and we’ll be prioritizing them in our next release.
Regarding the error you encountered after installing the plugin and connecting your GitHub account—"The plugin io.revenate.actionate failed to save settings. Please restart GoLand"—this does appear to be a false positive. Behind the scenes, we use the built-in IDE mechanisms to persist the selected GitHub account, and sometimes the IDE throws this error when attempting to save the settings file for the first time. This happens because the IDE tries to back up the settings file before persisting changes, and intermittently fails to detect that the file doesn’t exist yet. We’ve already reported this issue to JetBrains.
As for your feedback about the lack of search functionality and scrollbar behavior in step logs, you're absolutely right—log search is a critical feature, and it's planned for the very next release. Regarding the scrollbar, our UI leverages the JetBrains embedded JCEF (Chromium-based) browser, and its behavior can vary depending on the IDE version. In some versions, the scrollbar is always present, while in others it only appears when scrolling. This behavior is controlled by the underlying JCEF implementation, and we’ve also raised this issue with JetBrains.
We sincerely appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts, and your feedback helps us improve Actionate to better serve our users. Please keep the suggestions coming—we love hearing from you!