Do you do deployments when you push a new tag? Do you ever have multiple deployments in single repository? Do some of those deployments take a long time? Could some of these deployments be sometimes skipped if certain files haven't changed? If you answered yes to all of these questions, this action might be for you.

description: The glob(s) of the files to check for changes (uses minimatch). All file changes that don't match at least one of the globs are filtered out. If you want to provide multiple globs, use a , between each glob. Defaults to **. required: false
example: src/**
example: **
example: *.js,*.py

Ensure to set the step ID using the id attribute. See the docs.

description: The names of all of the added, modified, removed and renamed files (comma separated).
example: a.txt, src/b.txt

description: The names of the newly created files (comma separated).
example: a.txt, src/b.txt

description: The names of the updated files (comma separated).
example: a.txt, src/b.txt

description: The names of the removed files (comma separated).
example: a.txt, src/b.txt

description: The names of the renamed files (comma separated).
example: a.txt, src/b.txt

description: Whether there were any files changes. This will always be false when this action runs on the first tag (as there is nothing to compare this tag to).
example: true

description: Whether this is the first tag.
example: false

You have repository that contains both the Android files (android/) and iOS files (ios/). Your GitHub action(s) contain two builds, one for iOS and one for Android. Sometimes, you only need to update your iOS application or vice versa. If one of these situations occur, you want to make sure only the builds that need to run actually do run.

# This is required. This *must* only be run when a tag is pushed.
on:
  push:
    tags:
      # This is a catch all pattern but you can define your own pattern
      - '*'

jobs:
  deployment:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - id: android_changes
        with:
          glob: android/**
        uses: jsmith/changes-since-last-tag@v1

      - id: ios_changes
        with:
          glob: ios/**
        uses: jsmith/changes-since-last-tag@v1

      # The == 'true' is important since we can only output strings
      # If you forgot this, the build will always run... I think
      - if: steps.android_changes.outputs.any_changes == 'true'
        run: make android # just an example command

      # Same as above except for ios
      - if: steps.ios_changes.outputs.any_changes == 'true'
        run: make ios