PatchRail CI Triage Action

Classify a failed CI log locally on the runner and surface the matching PatchRail /fix remediation guide as a job annotation and step summary. Read-only by design: it never opens a pull request, posts a comment, claims funding, or sends your logs anywhere.

It wraps the patchrail CLI's offline patchrail ci explain command (100+ failure signatures across Python, Node, Go, Rust, Java, Ruby, PHP, .NET, Docker, GitHub Actions and more). PatchRail is open source (Apache-2.0) — the CLI, the failure-signature zoo and the issue tracker live at github.com/patchrail/patchrail.

Usage

Install from the GitHub Marketplace listing, or copy the step below into any workflow that already captures its failed build or test log.

- name: Build
  shell: bash
  run: make build 2>&1 | tee build.log
- name: PatchRail CI triage
  if: failure()
  uses: patchrail/ci-triage-action@v1
  with:
    log-path: build.log

That's the whole thing: capture your build/test output to a file, then add the step guarded by if: failure(). On a red run you get an annotation like python-test-failure (confidence 0.89) — guide: getpatchrail.com/fix/... plus a job summary block.

When no rule matches the log, the class stays unknown — PatchRail does not guess — but the annotation hands back the line the runner itself flagged for the failing step, so you still land on the error instead of on "no signal found":

unknown (confidence 0.15) — runner reported: "github-token" length must be less
than or equal to 100 characters long — guide: getpatchrail.com/fix

Capturing the log correctly

The capture step above is deliberate in two ways, and both matter:

• shell: bash runs the step with -o pipefail. The default run: shell is bash -e, where a pipeline reports the status of its last command — so make build | tee build.log exits 0 even when the build fails. The step would go green, if: failure() would never fire, and your broken build would sail through CI. With shell: bash, a failing command still fails the step.
• 2>&1 puts stderr in the log. Plenty of tools (compilers, linters, mypy, cargo) report errors only on stderr; without the redirect the log ends up empty and there is nothing to classify.

If the log is missing or empty anyway, the action says so in an annotation and leaves the step green — it will not stack a second failure on top of the one you are already debugging.

Which ref to pin

@v1 is a moving tag: it points at the latest commit on main that passed the test suite, and it will keep moving within the v1 line (no breaking changes to inputs or outputs). If you would rather review every change yourself, pin the full commit SHA instead:

uses: patchrail/ci-triage-action@<commit-sha>

Inputs

Input	Default	Description
log-path	''	Path to the CI log file to explain.
log-text	''	Raw log text, used when no file is available.
redact	'true'	Redact secrets, emails and home paths locally first.
patchrail-version	''	Pin a specific patchrail version from PyPI.
python-version	'3.x'	Python version used to run the classifier.

Provide either log-path (preferred) or log-text.

Outputs

Output	Description
failure-class	Classified failure class, e.g. python-test-failure.
confidence	Classifier confidence between 0 and 1.
guide-url	PatchRail /fix remediation guide URL for the class.

When there is no log to classify (the file is missing or empty), failure-class and confidence are empty and guide-url is the guide index.

Example: capture the log and triage on failure

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Run tests
        shell: bash
        run: pytest -q 2>&1 | tee test.log
      - name: PatchRail CI triage
        if: failure()
        uses: patchrail/ci-triage-action@v1
        with:
          log-path: test.log

Permissions

The action needs no special token. It only reads the log file you point it at and writes to the run's annotation stream and job summary:

permissions:
  contents: read

Privacy

Classification runs entirely on the runner. With redact: true (the default), secrets, emails and home paths are stripped before the log is parsed. Nothing is uploaded.

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Part of the open-source PatchRail project. Maintained by Pablo Guillén · PatchRail · getpatchrail.com.

Licensed under the Apache License 2.0.