About Actions policies

Govern how GitHub Actions workflows run within your repository, organization, or enterprise.

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About Actions policies

Actions policies let you govern how GitHub Actions workflows run. You can configure them in the Policies section of your GitHub Actions settings (separate from the General settings).

Actions policies are available at the enterprise, organization, and repository levels. They currently contain one type of policy: workflow execution protections. GitHub plans to add more policies over time.

About workflow execution protections

With workflow execution protections, you can define an allowlist that controls who can trigger GitHub Actions workflows and which events are permitted to run them. These protections can disrupt several real-world attack patterns:

  • Poisoned pipeline execution from pull requests. Restrict or prohibit pull_request_target, including in public repositories where it is most often exploited.
  • Manual-trigger abuse. Limit workflow_dispatch so untrusted identities cannot start workflows.
  • Untrusted-actor execution. Block low-trust identities from triggering workflows entirely.
  • Misconfiguration exploitation. Apply central policy that overrides any single misconfigured workflow file.

When enforced, disallowed workflow runs will fail with an error. For example:

Event 'workflow_dispatch' is not allowed to trigger Actions workflows. Workflow file: '.github/workflows/0-welcome.yml'.

Note

GitHub has added a default policy that will block the pull_request_target event in public repositories. This policy will be enforced on November 2, 2026. See Securely using pull_request_target.

Available rules

  • Actor rules control who can trigger workflows, including individual users, repository roles, GitHub Apps, Copilot, and Dependabot. By default, every user with write access to a repository can trigger workflows. Actor rules let you separate who contributes code from who runs your CI, so you can grant a contributor write access without granting them the ability to execute workflows.
  • Event rules control which events are permitted, such as push, pull_request, pull_request_target, and workflow_dispatch.

GitHub plans to add more rules over time.

Next steps

To configure workflow execution protections, see Controlling who can execute GitHub Actions workflows.

To manage policies programmatically, see REST API endpoints for GitHub Actions policies.