GitHub Actions

Claude Code Action is a GitHub Actions integration from Anthropic that uses Claude to answer questions, review pull requests, and implement code changes in GitHub repositories. It detects its execution mode from workflow context, including @claude mentions, issue assignments, and explicitly prompted automation tasks, then interacts with pull requests and issues through GitHub APIs and file operations. It can produce structured JSON outputs for automation workflows and display progress through updating checklists. The action runs on the repository's own GitHub runner, while model requests are sent through Anthropic's API, Amazon Bedrock, Google Vertex AI, or Microsoft Foundry. It is licensed under the MIT License.

GitHub Actions Runner Images is the source repository used by GitHub to create VM images for GitHub-hosted Actions runners and by Microsoft for Azure Pipelines hosted agents. It defines Linux, macOS, and Windows images for x64 and Arm64 architectures, including their YAML labels and preinstalled software. The repository contains image definitions, build sources, release information, and policies for software installation, image support, version updates, and deprecation. Images are typically updated weekly; the `-latest` labels migrate gradually to newer stable operating-system versions, while GA images support at most the two newest OS versions and beta images are used for feedback before general availability. The repository also documents package-manager-based installation, supported tool-version strategies, and instructions for building a VM image from the source.

GitHub CLI is GitHub's official command-line tool, developed for GitHub.com, GitHub Enterprise Cloud, and GitHub Enterprise Server. The `gh` command brings pull requests, issues, and other GitHub concepts into the terminal alongside Git and source code, including workflows for authenticating an account, creating repositories and branches, pushing changes, and opening draft pull requests. It supports macOS, Windows, and Linux, and an agent skill is available for driving `gh` from coding agents.

Factory is a reference software factory for Claude Code and Codex that installs a repeatable, version-controlled software-delivery workflow into an existing GitHub project. GitHub Issues serve as the work queue, while committed policies, skills, labels, handoff comments, pull requests, and run records preserve state between fresh agent sessions. Scheduled agents triage issues, route them to implementation, specification, questions, or blockers, claim bounded work, implement it on a branch, run configured type, lint, test, build, audit, and architecture checks, obtain independent verification, and open draft pull requests. An independent verifier reads the diff and checks that the new test fails without the implementation. Humans retain responsibility for ambiguous requirements, system design, significant changes, and merging pull requests. The repository has no custom orchestrator or queue service. Claude Code routines provide the default scheduling and compute, with a thin Codex adapter using the same policies, gates, and evidence files; GitHub events or an optional API-triggered Action can also start runs. It is configured through files such as a human-owned charter and gates script, and includes a /factory control room backed by live issues, pull requests, and run records.

actions/checkout is a GitHub Actions action that checks a repository out into the workflow’s `$GITHUB_WORKSPACE` directory for use by subsequent steps. It can select a repository and ref, perform shallow or complete-history fetches, sparse or partial checkouts, and fetch submodules, Git LFS files, tags, and authenticated content. By default, it fetches only the commit for the event’s triggering ref or SHA; `fetch-depth: 0` retrieves all branches and tags. Authentication can use a token or SSH key configured in the local Git configuration and removed during post-job cleanup; recent releases store persisted credentials in a separate file under `$RUNNER_TEMP`. If Git 2.18 or newer is unavailable, the action falls back to the GitHub REST API to download files. Checkout v7 migrates the action to ESM, updates direct and transitive dependencies, and refuses fork pull-request code by default for workflows triggered by `pull_request_target` or `workflow_run`, which have access to the base repository’s token, secrets, and runner. Reviewed exceptions can opt in with `allow-unsafe-pr-checkout: true`.