GitHub Actions Supercharged

Examples

Let’s start with code and see GitHub actions in action. 😄

Mobile app with firebase

workflow "Test on every push" {
  on = "push"
  resolves = ["TypeCheck", "Lints", "Unit Tests", "E2E Tests"]
}

action "Yarn Install" {
  uses = "docker://node:10"
  runs = "yarn"
  args = "install"
}

action "TypeCheck" {
  needs = ["Yarn install"]
  uses = "docker://node:10"
  runs = "yarn"
  args = "tsc"
}

action "Lints" {
  needs = ["Yarn install"]
  uses = "docker://node:10"
  runs = "yarn"
  args = "tslint"
}

action "Unit Tests" {
  needs = ["Yarn install"]
  uses = "docker://node:10"
  runs = "yarn"
  args = "test"
}

action "E2E Tests" {
  needs = ["Yarn install"]
  uses = "docker://node:10"
  runs = "yarn"
  args = "e2e"
}

This will run the tests on every push, including ones in an PR. And if something went wrong, these checks will fail on that PR.

When when PR is merged

workflow "Automatically deploy to staging" {
  on = "push"
  resolves = ["Deploy Staging"]
}

action "Is backend files changed" {
  uses = "zhigang1992/ismodifiedaction@master"
  args = "packages/web folder/of/myBackendProject .github/main.workflow"
}

action "Is Develop Branch" {
  uses = "actions/bin/filter@master"
  args = "branch develop"
}

action "Build" {
  needs = ["Yarn install"]
  uses = "docker://node:10"
  runs = "yarn"
  args = "build"
}

action "Deploy Staging" {
  needs = ["Is backend files changed", "Is Develop Branch", "Build"]
  uses = "./.github/yarn"
  args = "deploy staging"
  secrets = [
    "FIREBASE_TOKEN",
  ]
}

Then when it comes release to production

workflow "Deploy to Production on Release" {
  on = "release"
  resolves = ["Deploy iOS App", "Deploy Android App", "Deploy Production"]
}

action "Deploy iOS App" {
  uses = "./.github/deployMac"
  args = "ios"
  secrets = [
    "MAC_MACHINE_TOKEN",
  ]
}

action "Deploy Android App" {
  uses = "./.github/androidBuild"
  args = "ios"
  secrets = [
    "GOOGLE_PLAY_TOKEN",
  ]
}

action "Deploy Production" {
  needs = ["Build"]
  uses = "./.github/yarn"
  args = "deploy production"
  secrets = [
    "FIREBASE_TOKEN",
  ]
}

All we need to do now is draft a release on GitHub, and everything will be deployed automatically.

This blog

This blog is also powered by GitHub Action:

1. It will deploy to https://reily.app when push or merge PRs to master. Which is hosted on Firebase Hosting
2. It will deploy to https://reily_<branch_name>.surge.sh when push to none master PRs.
3. It will add a comment to PRs when created.

You can find the source code here

Comparing over traditional CI infrastructure.

GitHub actions has all the quality of a good CI server:

• Configure as code in version control
• Flexible and scalable container execution

GitHub Integration

Comparing to other CI solution like Jenkins, Circle, TravisCI.

GitHub actions is much easier to integrate with GitHub.

For one, you no longer need to setup Deploy key or ssh key just to checkout the code. It’s also much easier to report back to GitHub with in action with GITHUB_TOKEN.

And also no need for a separate account/user permission system for CI.

Community backed actions

main.workflow and all of your custom actions lives with your code base, and verson controlled.

You can use in a step:

• any docker container
• subfolder in current repo
• any public repo on GitHub

And with the community grow, there are more and more repo on GitHub that you can plug and play.

If you build a useful custom action, simply by extracting into a repo. Other people would be able to use it in their code.

Capabilities

https://developer.github.com/actions/creating-github-actions/accessing-the-runtime-environment/#runtime-environment-resources

• 1 virtual CPU
• Up to 3.75 GB of memory
• Remote network access
• Environment variables describing current workflow context
• Write access to the filesystem
• 100 GB of disk space

Lack of Capabilities

Because it’s run in a linux docker container, we can’t build iOS app within action (obviously)

Alternatively, we can using ssh-remote to remote into a mac instance. Example: https://gist.github.com/d5c4d61b692ba8511ea6f52d54ce79c5

Useful Stuff

To get started with Github actions, you should check out https://github.com/actions/bin

For example if you want to debug action, simply plugin actions:bin/debug to print out all the enviornment variables and /github/workflow/event.json

It is also a pain to push to GitHub every time to test out some script, luckily you can use act to debug locally.

Currently, GitHub actions doesn’t support error reporting, it will only so up on the PR status. So example if you have a action listening for release event. It won’t show you anything if it fails.

So we need to come up with our own reporting.

Here is the entrypoint.sh for a custom action, which will report to telegram is anything went wrong during yarn * task.

#!/bin/sh -l

(
set -e
sh -c "yarn install"
sh -c "yarn $*"
)
errorCode=$?
if [ $errorCode -ne 0 ]; then
  echo "We have an error"
  curl \
   --data-urlencode "chat_id=$TELEGRAM_CHAT_ID" \
   --data-urlencode "parse_mode=Markdown" \
   --data-urlencode "text=*Error*:
*action*:$GITHUB_WORKFLOW - $GITHUB_ACTION
*by*:$GITHUB_ACTOR
*in*:$GITHUB_REF" \
   https://api.telegram.org/bot$TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN/sendMessage
  exit $errorCode
fi

Issues

At the moment there are still some minor issues with GitHub action, for example:

1. Cancel is treated as error in PR.
2. Cancel one step will cancel whole workflow.
3. Can not re-run actions

But nothing deal breakers.

Also it’s in beta, and I’m it will get a lot before when it’s publicly available.