AdaGPT VS toolkit

I posted my GitHub Action, AdaGPT, for the GitHub Hackathon here on DEV.to a few days ago. While implementing this action, I learned a lot and want to take the time to share them. Here are my learnings in no particular order:

Repository Marketplace

Different libraries (like actions/toolkit and microsoft/azure-pipelines-task-lib) with more accessible and easy-to-use APIs are available out-of-box

I used the libraries from actions/toolkit to create my action. It's more comfortable than when I did it with Docker. I looked at all the libraries, and most of all: actions/core, actions/exec and actions/github.

The Action is built using TypeScript and Node.js, popular choices for GitHub Actions due to their excellent support for asynchronous operations, a crucial requirement considering the multiple I/O operations involved. In the initial setup, I used the actions/toolkit package which provides useful utilities to streamline the creation of GitHub Actions. I picked @actions/core for basic functionalities such as inputs, outputs, and error handling, @actions/github to interact with GitHub's REST API, and @actions/exec to execute shell commands.

The package @actions/github provides a hydrated Octokit.js client. Octokit.js is the SDK of GitHub and contains several subpackages like @octokit/rest and @octokit/graphql to interact with the REST or GraphQL API.

The GitHub Action was implemented with TypeScript using the GitHub Actions Toolkit and the OpenAI Node.js Library. The Action is activated on new comments on issues and pull requests if they mention @AdaGPT. The relevant issue number is determined from the event payload. Then all existing comments for this issue are read. If the issue is a pull request, the git diff is also read.

Creating actions can be an overwhelming task, so to help you on your journey, here are two indispensable resources that can assist you in getting started; Actions Toolkit and Javascript action template. Still, this article will dive into how to create an action.

Please support something like "allow-failure" for a given job

More than 2 years of ignoring requests to add an important feature (allow-failure) to Github Actions (ref, ref. When not ignoring, completely misunderstanding the feature as if those building Github Actions are unfamiliar with core features of competing platforms.