How to Inspect the Event Payload in GitHub Actions

The github.event context is the full webhook payload; dumping it shows exactly which fields exist for the event that triggered the run.

Print ${{ toJSON(github.event) }}, or cat the file at $GITHUB_EVENT_PATH. Both show the raw payload so you can confirm a field like github.event.pull_request.merged is actually present.

Steps

• Add a step that dumps the event payload.
• Find the field path you need (it differs per event type).
• Use jq on $GITHUB_EVENT_PATH to extract a single value.

Workflow

steps:
  - name: Dump the event payload
    env:
      EVENT: ${{ toJSON(github.event) }}
    run: echo "$EVENT"
  - name: Pull one field out with jq
    run: |
      jq '.action, .pull_request.number' "$GITHUB_EVENT_PATH"

Gotchas

• Payload shape depends on the event; a push payload has no pull_request object.
• github.event.head_commit is null for many events, which breaks naive [skip ci] checks.
• The file at $GITHUB_EVENT_PATH is the same data the context exposes.

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