Annotation limitation

[olivernybroe]

I am trying to create a linting tool which runs as a GitHub action, however I keep running into limitations on GitHub actions.

So it looks like only 10 annotations are shown, but when my linting tool on a codebase, there could be like 500 errors, so this is obviously not ideal.

It seems like with a GitHub App you are allowed to add infinite amount of annotations, which sounds perfect, however than I have to migrate to a GitHub App, which is annoying as I want to run it with GitHub actions.

I also tried creating a review instead, however reviews can only add comments to lines which are changed in the PR and you cannot add a review if the changes are not in a PR. Also the review API crashes/times out if you add around 20 comments in one request.

I am kinda in a loss, what other solutions have I forgotten to look into? Or did I oversee something?
I think the bast case would be if something like the check api could be made available for GitHub actions

[BrightRan]

@olivernybroe ,

Currently, GitHub Actions does not support so much annotations in a workflow run, the below is a summary of the limitation:

• 10 warning annotations and 10 error annotations per step
• 50 annotations per job (sum of annotations from all the steps)
• 50 annotations per run (separate from the job annotations, these annotations aren’t created by users

There is a similar ticket as reference: https://github.community/t5/GitHub-Actions/Maximum-number-of-annotations-that-can-be-created-using-GitHub/m-p/39085/highlight/false#M3660

[olivernybroe]

Yep and that limitation is why I cannot show the errors as annotations, as 10 annotations is a really low limit.

[BrightRan]

@olivernybroe ,

Yeah, currenly we have no any available way to bypass the limitation.

If your projects really need more annotations, I recommend you directly report a feature request here. That will allow you to directly interact with the appropriate engineering team, and make it more convenient for the engineering team to collect and categorize your suggestions.

[lisanna-dettwyler]

I've done so here: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/68471. Was very frustrated to run into this.

[Simran-B]

It’s possible to output Markdown summaries now, which can be used to generate nicely formatted reports:

  <a href="https://github.blog/2022-05-09-supercharging-github-actions-with-job-summaries/" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow ugc" title="04:00PM - 09 May 2022">The GitHub Blog – 9 May 22</a>

Supercharging GitHub Actions with Job Summaries | The GitHub Blog

You can now output and group custom Markdown content on the Actions run summary page.

Est. reading time: 3 minutes

[igiona]

@olivernybroe have file a feature request? If yes could you link it here?

[yzhaoa]

For the record, you can now exceed the 10 annotation limit using the checks API directly:

1. Refer to https://docs.github.com/en/rest/checks/runs?apiVersion=2022-11-28, under output.annotations, in particular how there is a limit of 50 annotations in the create request, and how you can exceed that limit by calling update with more annotations.
2. To call this API more easily, use https://github.com/actions/github-script which allows you to call GitHub APIs with workflow permissions.

I have tested this and generated almost 1000 annotations on a commit successfully.

That said, I do recommend only generating annotations on changed files in a PR. Otherwise the PR will get polluted with a ton of unrelated files and annotations on them.