GitHub Action Template Finder

Find production-grade GitHub Actions workflow templates by category — deployment, testing, security scanning, and Claude Code integrations — without manually clicking through 10,000+ public repos. This Actor searches the GitHub code search API, filters by parent-repo stars, fingerprints which tools each workflow uses, then ranks the results by quality. The output is a copy-paste–ready ranked list of .yml files you can drop into your .github/workflows/ directory.

Part of Ian Mu's 100-actor portfolio at github.com/ianymu. Inspired by the post-Stop self-verification flow at github.com/ianymu/claude-verify-before-stop.

What does GitHub Action Template Finder do?

It queries the GitHub code search API for workflow YAML files in the .github/workflows/ directory across all of GitHub, scoped by four supported categories: deployment (Vercel / AWS / GCP / Azure), testing (Playwright / Jest / Cypress), security (CodeQL / Trivy / Snyk / Semgrep), and Claude Code (workflows that use anthropics/claude-code-action). For each hit it fetches the parent repo's star count, downloads the raw workflow file, counts lines, fingerprints which third-party Actions are used, and assigns a 0–100 quality score. Results are sorted high-to-low and pushed to the dataset.

Why use it?

• Bootstrap new repos faster. Find a battle-tested deploy workflow used by a 100k-star project and adapt it, instead of writing from scratch.
• Catalog the Claude Code ecosystem. This is currently the easiest way to see real-world anthropics/claude-code-action usage patterns across GitHub.
• Audit your own stack. Compare your workflows to top-rated equivalents in your category and find missing pieces (cache, security scanning, etc.).

How to use it

1. Open the Input tab and pick your categories (default: all four).
2. Set minRepoStars to filter out hobby repos (default: 500).
3. Set maxResults (default: 30) — higher = slower because of GitHub rate limits.
4. Important: set a GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable (a fine-grained PAT with public_repo scope is enough). The GitHub code search API requires auth.
5. Click Start and inspect the Output tab when finished.

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
categoryFilter	array	["deployment", "testing", "security", "claude-code"]	Categories to fetch
minRepoStars	int	500	Skip workflows whose repo has fewer stars
maxResults	int	30	Stop after this many qualified templates

Output

Each item in the dataset:

{
  "repo": "vercel/next.js",
  "workflowPath": ".github/workflows/deploy.yml",
  "workflowName": "Deploy to Production",
  "categories": ["deployment", "vercel"],
  "lineCount": 87,
  "toolsUsed": ["vercel-action", "node-setup", "cache"],
  "rawUrl": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vercel/next.js/canary/.github/workflows/deploy.yml",
  "repoStars": 128000,
  "repoLanguage": "JavaScript",
  "repoPushedAt": "2026-05-19T03:12:44Z",
  "qualityScore": 95
}

You can download the dataset in JSON, CSV, HTML, or Excel. A Markdown summary (workflow-templates.md) is also written to the default key-value store.

Data table

Field	Meaning
repo	The repository hosting the workflow
workflowName	Value of name: at the top of the workflow YAML
categories	Inferred categories (primary + detected from content)
toolsUsed	Fingerprinted Actions: vercel-action, docker, claude-code, codeql, etc.
lineCount	Workflow YAML line count
qualityScore	0–100, weighted by stars / size / tool diversity / has name / freshness

Pricing / Cost estimation

Each run hits GitHub's code-search API four times (once per category), plus one repo-meta call and one raw-file fetch per candidate. With default settings (maxResults: 30) and a personal GITHUB_TOKEN, expect ~150 API calls total and well under one compute unit per run on Apify Free.

Tips

• Rate limit: GitHub gives 30 code-search requests/min, 5,000 REST requests/hour for an authenticated user. Bump maxResults carefully.
• Boost recall: lower minRepoStars to find smaller-but-recently-active repos.
• Claude Code only: pass ["claude-code"] as categoryFilter for an ecosystem map.

FAQ, disclaimers, and support

• Is scraping GitHub legal? This Actor uses GitHub's official REST API. You must comply with GitHub's API terms.
• GitHub code search misses some results. GitHub code search indexes default branches of public repos only. Some workflows on non-default branches will be missed.
• Issues / feature requests: open an issue at github.com/ianymu.

Author: Ian Mu — One-person AI company experiments at github.com/ianymu.