action-doctl | GitHub Actions for DigitalOcean - doctl | Continous Integration library

There are a couple of approaches I can think of:

1. As you mentioned, replacing the create-envfile Action invocation with your own script to dump environment variables to a .env file and adding that as an argument to your appleboy/ssh-action invocation step. I don't see this as a major burden - you could just copy most of the code from here.
2. Keeping the SpicyPizza/create-envfile action step but modifying the output path to a location inside the GitHub Actions runner. Then, scp the env file you just created to your droplet. You can do this with your own subsequent run step or you could use this scp GitHub Action. File changes by separate steps remain in the runner workspace until the end of the job, and subsequent steps see previous steps' changes on the runner's filesystem.