WordPress Actions is a collection of actions - well, for now it's just one action - to easily publish / release your plugin on WordPress.org official repository. These actions assume you're using strict Semantic Versioning tagging for the full releases of your plugin.

To use it, you have just three mandatory steps to follow:

• Secrets. In your repository settings, create the secrets SVN_USERNAME and SVN_PASSWORD to store your WordPress svn username and password.
• Assets. By default, WordPress.org specific assets of your plugin (like icons and headers) must be in a .wordpress-org directory at the root of your GitHub repository.
• Workflows. You have to write worflows, with yaml, in a .github/workflows directory at the root of your GitHub repository.

In addition to that, you can write to the root of your repository plugin a .gitattributes files to exclude files from your workflows like this one:

/README.md export-ignore
/.gitattributes export-ignore
/.gitignore export-ignore
/.github export-ignore
/.wordpress-org export-ignore

In your yaml files you MUST set this environment variable:

• NAME - the name of the plugin.

You CAN set too these two environment variables:

• SLUG - defaults to the respository name, customizable in case your WordPress repository has a different slug.
• ASSETS_DIR - defaults to .wordpress-org, customizable for other locations of WordPress.org plugin repository-specific assets that belong in the top-level assets directory (the one on the same level as trunk).

When you want to deploy a new version of your plugin, just make a new release in GitHub. The tag value you put will lead to different behavior:

• If the tag is like 1.0.0, it will generate a full release on WordPress.org: trunk and assets will be updated and a new tags/1.0.0 will be created.
• If the tag is like 1.0.0-rc1, it will generate a short release on WordPress.org: only trunk and assets will be updated. It allows, in particular, to make a "strings freeze" to let translators do their work on the "development" branch.

I suggest you to create a workflow like this to implement such behaviors:

name: New WordPress.org release

on:
  release:
    types: [published]

jobs:
  tag:
    name: New release
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@master
      - name: WordPress Plugin Deploy
        uses: Pierre-Lannoy/wordpress-actions/dotorg-plugin-deploy@master
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          SLUG: the-plugin-slug
          NAME: The Plugin Name
          SVN_PASSWORD: ${{ secrets.SVN_PASSWORD }}
          SVN_USERNAME: ${{ secrets.SVN_USERNAME }}