GitHub Actions Log Copy

Summary

GitHub Actions Log Copy is a tiny browser extension that adds a copy button directly to each step header on GitHub Actions job log pages.

The goal is simple: make it easy to copy the output from one step without scrolling through a giant log view and drag-selecting text by hand.

The problem

GitHub Actions job pages make it awkward to copy the output of a single step.

If a job has a long log, you usually have to:

expand the right step
scroll through the output
carefully drag-select only the text you want
hope you did not miss a line or grab the neighboring step

That gets especially annoying when you are sharing a failure snippet, debugging a flaky test, or asking an LLM to help explain one particular step.

The product

This extension adds a copy icon to the far right side of each step header, just to the left of the duration.

When clicked, it:

auto-expands the step if needed
copies only that step's log lines
leaves out the step title, line numbers, and surrounding UI noise

Implementation notes

GitHub virtualizes long logs in the DOM, which means a naive content-script approach can miss lines that are not currently mounted on the page.

To make copying more reliable, the extension first tries to fetch the step-specific GitHub-hosted log fragment exposed on the page through the step's data-log-url attribute. If that fetch fails, it falls back to the rendered DOM.

That makes the extension a pragmatic GitHub UI integration rather than an official API integration, but it keeps the implementation small and gives much better results for long logs.

Why I like this project

I like small tools that solve a specific annoyance well.

This one is intentionally narrow:

no account system
no backend
no analytics
no settings panel
just a focused improvement to one frustrating workflow

It is also fully open source under the MIT license.