A dataset of GitHub Actions workflow histories

GitHub Actions is the de facto workflow automation tool for GitHub repositories. Its popularity has increased dramatically over the recent years, opening up opportunities for empirical studies related to its usage. To enable such studies, we implemented gigawork, an open source tool for extracting the commit histories of changes to workflow files in GitHub repositories. Using this tool we collected and publicly released a dataset of 160K+ commit histories of workflow files in 32K+ public GitHub repositories, covering 1.5M+ workflow file versions. In order to facilitate its use by other researchers, the dataset includes relevant metadata related to workflow file changes in each commit. gigawork is publicly released on PyPi. Its associated dataset can be found on Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10259013).