Automate Web Accessibility & Functionality Tests with the New Squidler GitHub Action (v2)

Continuous integration and automated quality tests are essential for modern web development. With the new Squidler GitHub Action v2, you can seamlessly integrate accessibility, functionality, and language testing into your CI/CD pipeline—no manual steps required. In this post, we’ll walk through:

• What the new Squidler Action does

• How to set it up in your repository

• How to configure secrets

• An example workflow file

• How to interpret the results

What is the Squidler GitHub Action?

The Squidler Action is a reusable GitHub Action that runs comprehensive web tests on your site using the Squidler platform. It automatically detects accessibility, functionality, and language issues, and reports them directly in your GitHub workflow summary.

Prerequisites

• A Squidler account and an API key. Sign up here if you don’t have one.

• Your project hosted on GitHub.

Step 1: Create your site and Site API Key

1. Create a new site in squidler
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2. Open the site and go to Settings → Developer area.
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3. Scroll down to Site API Keys.
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4. Create a new key by pressing the Add button, copy the key and give it an appropriate name.

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Step 2: Add Your API Key as a Secret

1. Go to your GitHub repository.
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2. Click Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions.
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3. Click New repository secret.
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4. Name it SQUIDLER_API_KEY and paste your Squidler API key as the value.

Step 3: Add the Squidler Action to Your Workflow

Create (or update) a workflow file in .github/workflows/, for example: .github/workflows/run-squidler-check.yml.

Here’s a minimal example:

name: Run Squidler Check

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
  pull_request:
    branches: [main]

jobs:
  squidler_check:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Run Squidler Test Action
        uses: squidlerio/actions@v2
        with:
          api-key: ${{ secrets.SQUIDLER_API_KEY }}
          fail-on-problems: true

      - name: Show Action Outputs
        if: always()
        run: |
          echo "Exit Code: ${{ steps.squidler_action_step.outputs.exit-code }}"
          echo "Problems Found: ${{ steps.squidler_action_step.outputs.problem-count }}"

Key options:

• api-key (required): Your Squidler API key (from secrets).

• fail-on-problems: If set to true, the workflow will fail if any problems are found.

Step 4: Push and Watch the Results

Commit and push your workflow file. On every push or pull request, Squidler will:

• Run a full suite of accessibility, functionality, and language tests.

• Output a summary in the GitHub Actions job summary, with direct links to the Squidler dashboard for details.

• Optionally fail the workflow if issues are found (if fail-on-problems: true).

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Advanced Options

You can further customize the action with these optional inputs:

• duration: Test duration in seconds (default: 10)

• fail-on-new-problems: Only fail if new problems are found

• suites: Comma-separated list of test suites to run (e.g., Accessibility,Functionality,Language)

• include-recreations: Include recreations in the test (default: true)

Example:

    - name: Run Squidler Test Action
        uses: squidlerio/actions@v2
        with:
          api-key: ${{ secrets.SQUIDLER_API_KEY }}
          fail-on-problems: true
          duration: 20
          suites: Accessibility,Functionality

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Happy testing!

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