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Copilot Users Can Ask About A Failed Actions Job [GA]

The ability to ask Copilot chat about Actions job failures is now Generally Available. You can now press “Explain Error” from the PR mergebox or the Actions Job Page to kick off a conversation with Copilot about why a job failed and what steps can be taken to resolve the issue.

Mergebox
Within the mergebox, you can select the “More actions” option for a failing check and click “Explain Error” as seen below:

Screenshot of Explain Error in the mergebox of a PR
This will open Copilot chat and ask Copilot about this particular job.

Actions Job Page
You can go to the Job page for a failing job and press the “Explain Error” button next to the search bar for logs as seen below:

Screenshot of Explain Error in the Actions job page

This will open Copilot chat and ask Copilot about this job.

Who has access to this capability?

“Explain Error” can only analyze one job at a time. It is available on all Copilot tiers, but does consume a chat message to use. See the Copilot subscriptions page for more information on limits per tier.

Join the discussion within the GitHub Community.

Phi-4 is now available in GitHub Models (GA)

Phi-4 Model Release on GitHub Models

The latest AI model from Phi, Phi-4, is now available in GitHub Models.

Phi-4 is a 14B parameter state-of-the-art small language model (SLM) that excels at complex reasoning and conventional language processing.

GitHub Models makes it easy for every developer to build AI features and products on GitHub.

Easily try, compare, and implement this model in your code for free in the playground or via the API. Compare it to a previous Phi model using the side-by-side feature in GitHub Models.

To learn more about GitHub Models, check out product documentation on GitHub Models. You can also join our community discussions.

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GitHub Actions: Ubuntu 20 runner image brownout dates and other breaking changes

Ubuntu 20 image is closing down

We are beginning the process of closing down the Ubuntu 20 hosted runner image, following our N-1 OS support policy. This image will be fully retired by April 1, 2025. We recommend updating workflows to use ubuntu-22.04, or ubuntu-24.04.

Brownout dates

To raise awareness of the upcoming removal we will temporarily fail jobs using the ubuntu-20.04 label starting in March 2025. The brownouts will occur on the following dates and times:
– March 4 14:00 UTC – 22:00 UTC
– March 11 13:00 UTC – 21:00 UTC
– March 18 13:00 UTC – 21:00 UTC
– March 25 13:00 UTC – 21:00 UTC

Upcoming breaking changes to hosted runner images

For a full list of this month’s breaking changes to our hosted runner images, please see our announcement page.

Artifact actions v3 brownouts

Artifact actions v3 will be closing down by January 30th, 2025. To raise awareness of the upcoming removal, we will temporarily fail jobs using v3 of actions/upload-artifact or actions/download-artifact. Builds that are scheduled to run during the brownout periods will fail. The brownouts are scheduled for the following dates and times:
– January 16th 3pm – 7pm UTC
– January 23rd 2pm – 10pm UTC

Note: v3 of the artifact actions will continue to be supported for GitHub Enterprise Server customers. The brownouts and retirement will not affect your workflows.

actions/cache v1-v2 and actions/toolkit cache package closing down

Starting February 1st, 2025, Actions’ cache storage will move to a new architecture, as a result we are closing down v1-v2 of actions/cache. In conjunction, all previous versions of the @actions/cache package (prior to 4.0.0) in actions/toolkitwill be closing down. If users run workflows that call the retired versions after February 1st, 2025, the workflows will fail.

You should upgrade to actions/cache v4 or v3 as soon as possible to avoid any disruption in February. For information on how to migrate, see the announcements in the actions/cache and actions/toolkit repositories.

Note: all versions of actions/cache will continue to be supported for GitHub Enterprise Server customers. The retirement will not affect your workflows.

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