jacoco-badge-generator VS upload-artifact

jacoco-badge-generator - Coverage badges, and pull request coverage checks, from JaCoCo reports in GitHub Actions

I just released jacoco-badge-generator 2.10.0, which can be run as a GitHub Action or as a command-line utility as part of CI/CD workflows for Java projects, as well as for projects in other JVM languages such as Kotlin, to parse JaCoCo test coverage reports, generate instructions coverage and branches coverage badges for project READMEs, serve as pull-request checks (e.g., validate minimum coverage thresholds), among other functionality.

I just release version v2.9.0, which enhanced the existing functionality associated with using the jacoco-badge-generator GitHub Action with multi-module projects. Specifically, prior to this release, for a multi-module project, the paths to all of the JaCoCo csv reports had to be listed in the inputs to the action. Now, as of v2.9.0, you can use a glob pattern to specify the paths to the JaCoCo csv reports. This can actually now also work for the more common single module project, but the glob functionality is likely most useful in the multi-module case. Note that the CLI mode already implicitly supported globs since your shell will expand any globs you specify on the command line. But as a GitHub Action this previously was not the case as GitHub Actions doesn't expand globs in the inputs to an Action. The jacoco-badge-generator v2.9.0 now handles glob expansion internally.

Vincent Cicirello - Open source GitHub Actions for workflow automation

I maintain several GitHub Actions implemented in Python as container actions. One of these, jacoco-badge-generator, produces coverage badges from JaCoCo test coverage reports. Additionally, it outputs the test coverage percentages to the workflow job summary. This example is based upon the approach I use in jacoco-badge-generator.

Check out all of our GitHub Actions: https://actions.cicirello.org/

I maintain several GitHub Actions, all of which are implemented in Python as container actions. This post explains how to test a GitHub Action using a GitHub Actions workflow, including using the workflow as a required check on Pull Requests. Although some of this post is specific to testing an action that is implemented in Python, much of the post is more generally applicable to testing actions regardless of implementation language.

The jacoco-badge-generator generates badges, but does not commit them. In this step, I just use a simple shell script to commit and push the badges. This step is conditional and runs only if the event that started the workflow is not a pull request (see the if: ${{ github.event_name != 'pull_request' }}). In other words, it runs on push and workflow_dispatch events. The coverage badges should be consistent with the state of the default branch, so committing badges that correspond to the coverage of a pull request that may or may not be merged doesn't make sense. If it is merged, the push event will then cause the workflow to run again, at which point the coverage badges will be committed. This step begins by changing the current directory to the directory where the badges branch was checked out. And it commits and pushes only if an svg or json file changed. The badges are SVGs, and recall the earlier step where I configured the jacoco-badge-generator to additionally generate a simple JSON file containing the coverage percentages.

There are two primary ways of implementing a GitHub Action: JavaScript Actions and Container Actions. The latter of which enables implementing Actions in any language via a Docker container. My language of choice for implementing GitHub Actions is Python. The purpose of most of these actions is to produce files (e.g., jacoco-badge-generator produces test coverage badges as SVGs, and generate-sitemap produces an XML sitemap) or to edit files in some way (e.g., javadoc-cleanup can insert canonical links and other user-defined elements into the head of javadoc pages). However, all of these also produce workflow step outputs. For example, generate-sitemap has outputs for the number of pages in the sitemap, and the number of pages excluded from the sitemap due to noindex or robots.txt exclusions; and jacoco-badge-generator has workflow step outputs for the coverage and branches coverage percentages if a user had some reason to use those in later steps of their workflow.

Vincent Cicirello - Open source GitHub Actions for workflow automation

upload-artifact

Here, the concept of "upload" is a little confusing. What the GitHub action upload-artifact does is to "copy" the jar file to a publicly accessible folder.

The content of the build destination folder folder needs is saved and transferred to the following jobs in the workflow. We do this with the Github actions actions/upload-artifact

The action for uploading the artifact doesn't do too much, but it takes care of all the nuance around GitHub Pages artifacts specifically. You can view the action's source here. It will tar the path (provided by the with option) and then call the upload artifact action. The artifact's name is github-pages and has a 1 day expiration. This artifact has the name and format required for the deploy action. It all just works (so far).

➜ getting-started-with-act git:(master) act -j build WARN ⚠ You are using Apple M1 chip and you have not specified container architecture, you might encounter issues while running act. If so, try running it with '--container-architecture linux/amd64'. ⚠ [Node.js CI/build] 🚀 Start image=node:16-buster-slim [Node.js CI/build] 🐳 docker pull image=node:16-buster-slim platform= username= forcePull=false [Node.js CI/build] 🐳 docker create image=node:16-buster-slim platform= entrypoint=["tail" "-f" "/dev/null"] cmd=[] [Node.js CI/build] 🐳 docker run image=node:16-buster-slim platform= entrypoint=["tail" "-f" "/dev/null"] cmd=[] [Node.js CI/build] ☁ git clone 'https://github.com/actions/setup-node' # ref=v3 [Node.js CI/build] ☁ git clone 'https://github.com/actions/cache' # ref=v3 [Node.js CI/build] ☁ git clone 'https://github.com/actions/upload-artifact' # ref=v3 [Node.js CI/build] ⭐ Run Main actions/checkout@v3 [Node.js CI/build] 🐳 docker cp src=/Users/andrewevans/Documents/projects/getting-started-with-act/. dst=/Users/andrewevans/Documents/projects/getting-started-with-act [Node.js CI/build] ✅ Success - Main actions/checkout@v3 [Node.js CI/build] ⭐ Run Main Use Node.js 16.x [Node.js CI/build] 🐳 docker cp src=/Users/andrewevans/.cache/act/actions-setup-node@v3/ dst=/var/run/act/actions/actions-setup-node@v3/ [Node.js CI/build] 🐳 docker exec cmd=[node /var/run/act/actions/actions-setup-node@v3/dist/setup/index.js] user= workdir= [Node.js CI/build] 💬 ::debug::isExplicit: [Node.js CI/build] 💬 ::debug::explicit? false

Notice that already known commands like flutter pub get and flutter build apk (apk in case of Android; aab in case of iOS) now it shows up on our workflow. But, to upload the generated app file (artifact), we'll need to use the action upload-artifact@v1 and parse the build path which it will be storing the app file.

So the uploading will likely be done by upload artifact. Then you'll likely want to use a matrix build/package your tool across different OS's.

Artifacts are files like APKs, screenshots, test reports, logs, which the workflow generates. You can upload and download artifacts to the current workflow using actions/upload-artifact@v2 and actions/download-artifact@v2 respectively.