Getting started

Your Account comes first

An Account is your company in Apex: one bill, one plan, and the GitHub organisations you connect to it. After you sign in, the first screen confirms Your details — the GitHub identity you will be the Owner as — and the next, Your Account, asks for the Account's name and billing address, with an optional tax ID. Press Create the Account and you are its Owner: you can invite colleagues, connect organisations and manage billing, and hand ownership on later.

Installing is not the whole of it

The installation is the part people remember, so it is worth saying plainly what it does and does not do. Installing the App on its own does not start anything. It tells GitHub to send us your events; it does not create an Account, choose a plan or begin a trial, and an installation that no Account holds runs nothing. Someone who finds the App in GitHub's directory and installs it from there is brought back to Apex to sign in and create an Account, and the organisation then waits on the connect screen under Already installed, waiting for an Account, with a button Connect organisation to your Account.

The step that starts runs is Start your trial, on the last screen of ours. Until it is pressed there is nothing to run your workflows against.

What happens on GitHub

The connect screen, Connect your GitHub organizations, has a button labelled Connect a GitHub organization. It takes you to the App's installation page on github.com — you will not need to go looking for it, and there is nothing to search for in your settings.

On GitHub's page you choose two things:

1. Where to install it. Your personal account, or an organisation you own. Apex asks GitHub, as you, whether you are an owner of it before it connects it to your Account.
2. Which repositories. All repositories, or Only select repositories and a list. You can change this later from GitHub, and adding a repository later does not need anything from us.

Press Install and GitHub returns you to the connect screen, which connects the organisation to your Account and lists it under Connected to your Account. Its repositories appear as GitHub reports them; there is nothing to push first. One Account can hold several organisations: connect each the same way.

When the ones you want are connected, press Continue to your trial. That screen shows each plan with its price, its concurrency and its included minutes, and the terms you accept by pressing Start your trial. For now a trial covers one organisation, and the screen names the one it is billed on. The screen after it offers to take a card, which you do not have to do to finish.

What the App asks for

Turning off hosted runners

While both are enabled, GitHub-hosted runners and Apex will each run the workflow. Add the secrets your workflows use to Apex, as the secrets and variables page describes, then disable Actions on the organisation, or on the repositories you move, once you have seen the first Apex run — the App keeps receiving the events either way.

Apex names each check run <workflow name> / <job name>; GitHub names its own after the job alone. If a branch protection rule requires a status check, select the Apex check in its place.

The apex CLI

The CLI runs workflows on your machine, sets secrets from a terminal, and reads a run's logs, timing and tests. It is published on npm and needs Node 24 or later:

npm install -g @apex-actions/cli
apex --version
apex login        # opens your browser to approve the CLI

Over SSH or in a container, apex login prints a code to enter on any device instead, a phone included — the API tokens guide's Signing in with no browser section has the details.

For scripts and CI, skip apex login and export a token from Settings → API tokens as APEX_TOKEN. Every command is in the CLI reference, under Reference in the docs menu.