What even is github_actions_cleanup?

This shell script is intended to be a simple tool to quickly delete all GitHub Workflow runs for a given workflow. It's initial impetus for existence was to cleanup the list of actions in dotcms/core repo where cruft had built up over time and made it difficult to find what you were looking for. It uses the common tools of GitHub CLI and jq in combination with bash and a little user interactivity to accomplish it's task. Note that this tool only removes the run history, it does not delete the code that defines the workflow or actions.

Prerequisites and Setup

GitHub CLI

The tool assumes you've got a working (installed and authenticated) GitHub CLI.
It uses the GitHub CLI for all interactions with GitHub, rather than use the GitHub API. I made this choice because it simplifies authentication and secret handling for me. Rather than read a sub-par quick-start that I could come up with, I'd suggest using GitHubs own documentation, but the tl;dr is

brew install gh
gh auth login

jq

jq is super powerful and extremely common. It gives us nice and easy ways to work with data in the JSON format. It is supported in all sorts of languages and platforms, full documentation can be found at the official site here.
In this case we just need the command line tool and it's easily installed using brew on macOS.

brew install jq

Execution File Permission

Thankfully modern systems require users to explicitly set execution permissions on files downloaded from the internet. Assuming you're in the directory where you've got your copy of cleanup_workflow_runs.sh you can set the proper file permissions by running the following command.

sudo chmod +x ./cleanup_workflow_runs.sh

Using The Tool

This tool requires only one parameter. That's a GitHub workflow id. The id can be the name, or the actual numeric id. I suggest using the numeric id because it's required to be unique. If you're using this tool, there's a decent chance you have a few workflow that share the same or very similar names. I'd suggest also using the -r flag to provide the target repo. Doing that allows you to run the script from outside of the local copy of the target repo and makes using the script much less finicky.

Providing values by flag

./cleanup_workflow_runs.sh -w <YOUR_WORKFLOW_ID> -r <OWNER/REPO>

Providing the Workflow ID by prompt

Alternately you can run the command without flags. In that case you'll be prompted for values during execution.