GitHub Workflows: Verify that `needs` references an existing job

[Zeitsperre]

Hey there, thanks for the work spent on this tool; It's saved me from so much digital embarrassment.

I'm wondering if it would be possible to add a check to the GitHub Workflow schema to ensure that the job: needs: entry references an existing job and raises an error when it can't find it, e.g.:

jobs:
  test:
    name: Test
    needs: some-job-that-doesnt-exist-in-file

This check might become complicated in the case of two jobs that are mistakenly configured to circularly depend upon each other, but that would be a particularly strange edge case; I'm not sure how often that happens.

[sirosen]

Thanks for your kind words!

I think that this kind of referential integrity may be beyond what JSON Schema is able to express. It would need to be a bespoke check, and I believe it may require evaluating expressions (because needs: ${{ foo.bar }} is valid). Overall, my initial reaction is that this is out of reach for what we can do within the scope of check-jsonschema.

I recommend considering actionlint, which is a dedicated GitHub Actions linter which supports this check.