A GitHub Actions dashboard for all your repos

The short version

• Quick check from the terminal: loop gh run list over your repos.
• Trends across an organization: Actions Performance Metrics under the organization’s Insights tab.
• A shared screen for the team: a self-hosted board such as GitactionBoard.
• Your own live view with alerts: a menu-bar app such as ShipBoard.

Why GitHub doesn’t give you this

The Actions tab lives inside each repository and lists only that repository’s runs. Your GitHub home feed doesn’t show workflow runs, and GitHub’s Actions notifications only cover runs you triggered yourself, so a teammate’s broken push to main in another repo can go unnoticed (more on that in Mac alerts for failed GitHub Actions workflows).

Option 1: loop the GitHub CLI over your repos

gh run list shows recent runs for one repository, and -R picks which one. A short loop gives you a text dashboard:

for repo in acme/api acme/web acme/infra; do
  echo "== $repo"
  gh run list -R "$repo" --branch main --limit 3
done

Add --status failure to list only failed runs, or --workflow deploy.yml to follow one workflow. For scripting, --json workflowName,status,conclusion,url returns fields you can pipe into jq.

This is free and needs nothing new, but it’s a snapshot. You have to run it, and it won’t tell you when something breaks.

Option 2: Actions Performance Metrics for an organization

In an organization, open Insights and choose Actions Performance Metrics. It shows average run time, queue time and failure rate per workflow, job and repository, over a period you pick. Actions Usage Metrics next to it shows minutes used. Organization owners, and people given the “View organization Actions metrics” permission, can see them.

This is the right tool for finding the flaky workflow or the repo that burns the most minutes. It’s built for trends, though, not for the state of the run that finished a minute ago.

Option 3: a self-hosted board for the team

GitactionBoard, an open-source project from otto, runs as a Docker container and shows workflow status across many public and private repositories in one web page. It can hide healthy builds, send failure alerts to Microsoft Teams, and publish a CCTray feed that build monitors such as CCMenu can read.

It suits a TV on the office wall or a shared URL. You host it, give it a token, and keep it running.

Option 4: a menu-bar app on your Mac

If the dashboard is for you rather than a team, a menu-bar app avoids running a server. ShipBoard watches the workflows you tick across any of your repositories and shows each one as a green, amber or red row, with jobs and steps underneath. A run that fails raises a native macOS notification, whoever started it.

1. Create a fine-grained token, choose the repositories, and set Actions and Metadata to Read-only.
2. Install ShipBoard, click +, choose GitHub and paste the token.
3. Search your repositories and tick the workflows you want on the board.

Know the limits before you pick it. ShipBoard follows each workflow’s default branch, works with github.com only, and its repository picker lists your 100 most recently pushed repositories. It’s free, runs only on your Mac, and can put GitLab CI, AWS CodePipeline, Vercel and Netlify on the same board.

Which should you use?

Comparing menu-bar apps specifically? See ShipBoard vs CCMenu, CatLight and others.

Sources

• GitHub CLI manual: gh run list
• GitHub Docs: about GitHub Actions metrics
• GitHub Docs: viewing GitHub Actions metrics
• GitactionBoard on GitHub