checkout VS ssh-action

checkout

To checkout the merged commit with actions/checkout on pull_request_target event, you need to get the pull request by GitHub API and set the merge commit hash to actions/checkout input ref.

If you re-run GHA after master changes, CI is testing over different code.

You can [disable](https://github.com/actions/checkout#checkout-pull-request-head-commit-instead-of-merge-commit) on the checkout action:

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There was an outage yesterday too when the GitHub action “checkout@v3” broke when they released “checkout@v4”

Yes, they broke the ability for GitHub CI to checkout repos…

https://github.com/actions/checkout/issues/1448

The first two steps are setting up the job's environment. The checkout action will checkout out the repository at the triggering ref. The setup-python action will setup the desired Python runtime. My package supports Python 3.9+ so I'm targeting the minimum version for my build environments.

These first few steps demonstrate how you can run commands like npm install or import other workflows such as how it uses the actions/checkout to copy the contents of the repository into a working directory on the runner host. Read Reusable workflows for more about the syntax for referencing them.

Check out the repo: We will use the actions/checkout action to checkout the repository.

Take a look at the checkout action usage here https://github.com/actions/checkout

Then, we have two important initial steps to define. The first one is an official GitHub Action used to check-out a repository so a workflow can access it. The second one it's pretty more complex but, briefly, downloads and set up a requested version of Java.

This GitHub action will use another ssh-action action to handle the remote ssh connection. After storing the connection credentials in the GitHub repository secrets, this can securely/dynamically connect to the remote Ubuntu machine. The last key for this action job is the script, or verbatim Ubuntu commands that will be run. For the sake of brevity, I have only written pseudo-code for the deployment steps.

If you have SSH setup, you could have the your pipeline SSH in and run start your script. A quick search found a few actions that might work, including this one that does most of the heavy lifting for you. Just setup your secrets, give it the command you want to run, and it'll go from there. Good luck!

Then on my backend and frontend GitHub repos, I'll have another GitHub Actions workflow that uses something like appleboy/ssh-action to simply SSH into my server, pull the new images, and re-start the containers, whenever someone pushes to master.

Personally I use GitHub Actions that connects via SSH and runs custom bash deploy scripts.

Executing remote ssh commands using appleboy/ssh-action@master.

Yeah it's definitely a pet project. I'll look into Puppet for actual applications. Do you think that something like this would be a good, realistic alternative rather than going over HTTPS, if the use case is just a few simple, repeated shell commands: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/ssh-remote-commands

SSH Remote Commands

Or you combine part of both and use a GitHub action to run the script from the first action as a remote SSH command: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/ssh-remote-commands

You could add a Github Action to your repo which uses https://github.com/appleboy/ssh-action that SSHs into your server, pulls the repo there and restarts pm2.