What's github.actor in scheduled jobs?

[flodolo]

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I've been scratching my head around this for 2 days, and I can't figure it out.

When you run a scheduled workflow, GitHub seems to be picking semi-random people as github.actor (they're part of the repo, but what it the criteria??).

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/learn-github-actions/contexts
This doesn't provide any useful information on scheduled jobs, just manual trigger.

The username of the user that triggered the initial workflow run. If the workflow run is a re-run, this value may differ from github.triggering_actor. Any workflow re-runs will use the privileges of github.actor, even if the actor initiating the re-run (github.triggering_actor) has different privileges.

Both the answers in this thread are incorrect, at least based on my experience: it's not the last person who edited the workflow, created it, or edited specific lines.

[Fgerthoffert]

We have the same challenge, on our end, it does seem to point towards the user who first added the scheduled parameter.

[HenryNguyen5]

I think it's based on their notification system for scheduled workflow runs: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/monitoring-and-troubleshooting-workflows/notifications-for-workflow-runs

Notifications for scheduled workflows are sent to the user who initially created the workflow. If a different user updates the cron syntax in
the workflow file, subsequent notifications will be sent to that user instead. If a scheduled workflow is disabled and then re-enabled,
notifications will be sent to the user who re-enabled the workflow rather than the user who last modified the cron syntax.

[dhalbert]

I asked GitHub support about this and got the following answer:

Indirectly mentioned in this documentation snippet, the actor tied to a workflow run triggered on schedule is the user who last edited the cron syntax on the workflow file, or re-enabled the workflow after it has been disabled.

Notifications for scheduled workflows are sent to the user who initially created the workflow. If a different user updates the cron syntax in the workflow file, subsequent notifications will be sent to that user instead. If a scheduled workflow is disabled and then re-enabled, notifications will be sent to the user who re-enabled the workflow rather than the user who last modified the cron syntax.

In this case, you can have the @[desired new user] disable and re-enable the workflow so that they become the actor for further workflow runs.

I had first tried to change the actor by merging a PR by the desired new user to the cron job .yml action. That did not change the actor. What did work was to log in as the new user and then disable and re-enable the workflow, as linked to above.

[carolinapc]

Could it be possible to have a new feature added in Github so we can define the user we want to trigger the scheduled workflow?
I have a use case where I need to validate whether a specific job is triggered by a specific user.

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[flodolo]

This is not outdated, and there is no answer.

What's supposed to happen once you mark a discussion as stale, but that's not true?

[gugaiz]

I think it should be an option to select the user that triggers the flow

[roNn23]

We need also a option to change the actor, e.g. maybe to github-actions[bot]

[MirzaMerdovic]

What I expected for scheduled workflow is to have some system name that would tell me that workflow was executed by a cron job, or at least that I am able to set that value via env var or something, but alas from what I understood the value of github.actor can change even and that just makes the whole thing useless for my scenario at least.

For sake of context my scenario is emitting custom Grafana metrics where I wanted to add triggered_by field that would tell me if job is executed by scheduler of manually by some person.