github-script VS checkout

I wrote a custom script to parse PR comments as input commands to interface with Terraform CLI, returning the output as bot comments. Each step of the workflow relies on GitHub Actions, including actions/github-script to interact with GitHub's API (while brushing up on my JavaScript!).

You can generate what to annotate with a few lines of shell and then use gihub-script

Nice idea, worth mentioning other features:

* Reusable workflows (note: matrix strategy doesn't work here): https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-workflows/reusing-w...

* Composite actions: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/creating-actions/creating...

* Script as action: https://github.com/actions/github-script

* Using GitHub Packages and artifacts: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/publishing-packages/about...

* Using docker-compose-like services that run alongside of the container: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-containerized-servi...

And many, many more :)

actions/github-script@v5

This workflow makes use of the awesome github-script that makes working with API's a breeze!

Note at the end of the bash, and we are leveraging a curl command to talk directly to the GitHub API. This curl command is meant for simplicity. All of this could have been done using the octokit.rest.js library or better github-script.

In this post, I am going to focus on the API and actions/github-script. This action makes it easy to quickly write a script in your workflow that uses the GitHub API and includes the workflow run context.

My new github action follows a simple workflow: Whenever a user opens a pull request to the repository with the configured workflow, a comment is made on the PR with a greeting to the user and another comment with the statistics about the repository and PR are posted. Used the github-scripts (https://github.com/actions/github-script) action to get the API and context to write my own script in the workflow. It was a very fun exercise for me. Thankyou Dev Team for this cool contest!

actions/github-script

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.

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.

publish_report: name: Publish HTML Report # using always() is not ideal here, because it would also run if the workflow was cancelled if: "success() || needs.test.result == 'failure'" needs: [test] runs-on: ubuntu-latest continue-on-error: true env: # Unique URL path for each workflow run attempt HTML_REPORT_URL_PATH: reports/${{ github.ref_name }}/${{ github.run_id }}/${{ github.run_attempt }} steps: - name: Checkout GitHub Pages Branch uses: actions/checkout@v2 with: ref: gh-pages - name: Set Git User # see: https://github.com/actions/checkout/issues/13#issuecomment-724415212 run: | git config --global user.name "github-actions[bot]" git config --global user.email "41898282+github-actions[bot]@users.noreply.github.com" - name: Download zipped HTML report uses: actions/download-artifact@v2 with: name: playwright-report path: ${{ env.HTML_REPORT_URL_PATH }} - name: Push HTML Report timeout-minutes: 3 # commit report, then try push-rebase-loop until it's able to merge the HTML report to the gh-pages branch # this is necessary when this job is running at least twice at the same time (e.g. through two pushes at the same time) run: | git add . git commit -m "workflow: add HTML report for run-id ${{ github.run_id }} (attempt: ${{ github.run_attempt }})" while true; do git pull --rebase if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then echo "Failed to rebase. Please review manually." exit 1 fi git push if [ $? -eq 0 ]; then echo "Successfully pushed HTML report to repo." exit 0 fi done - name: Output Report URL as Worfklow Annotation run: | FULL_HTML_REPORT_URL=https://ysfaran.github.io/playwright-gh-actions-gh-pages/$HTML_REPORT_URL_PATH echo "::notice title=📋 Published Playwright Test Report::$FULL_HTML_REPORT_URL"

Ther very first step is actions/checkout@v2 action, which take the latest code from the master branch.