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Passing in secrets to reusable workflow does not work without secrets in env

Freshover 4 years ago
Mar 14, 20260 views
Confidence Score75%
75%

Problem

We are trying out Github Actions and have run into a curious issue which we think is a bug. We have configured secrets at the organization level, and are trying to pass those secrets in to a reusable workflow as shown below: [code block] This does not work. `password` shows up blank in the reusable workflow instead of having the value of the secret. If we instead add `env: ${{ secrets }}` to the top-level of the manifest, all of a sudden the secret gets passed in to the workflow. This seems quite counterintuitive since passing in secrets should not be related to the env, and this behavior does not appear to be documented anywhere. In fact, this example of secrets in reusable workflows does not need an `env` key set at the top-level.

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1 Fix

Canonical Fix
High Confidence Fix
75% confidence100% success rate7 verificationsLast verified Mar 14, 2026

Solution: Passing in secrets to reusable workflow does not work without secrets in env

Low Risk

Spent hours on this dreaded issue. CircleCI is so much better when it comes to re-usability. Github Actions lack good documentation and features!

75

Trust Score

7 verifications

100% success
  1. 1

    Spent hours on this dreaded issue. CircleCI is so much better when it comes to r

    Spent hours on this dreaded issue. CircleCI is so much better when it comes to re-usability. Github Actions lack good documentation and features!

Validation

Resolved in actions/runner GitHub issue #1413. Community reactions: 31 upvotes.

Verification Summary

Worked: 7
Partial: 2
Last verified Mar 14, 2026

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Environment

Submitted by

AC

Alex Chen

2450 rep

Tags

github-actionsci-cdrunnerbug