javascript-action VS ncc

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.

The basic approach is pretty easy and described in GitHub documentation here. Also, there are simple JavaScript and TypeScript action examples provided by GitHub. I will not focus on it here.

During my search for deploying Lambdas via GitHub actions, I came across a tutorial that utilized ncc for converting TypeScript and bundling. While ncc is effective, I discovered esbuild, which proved to be significantly faster and perfectly suited to my requirements.

You could use ncc to compile a binary:

https://github.com/vercel/ncc

This appears to be caused by lazy loading of image layer data, particularly during container initialization, and latency introduced by the read operations. In general, you want to access as few files and as little data as possible during the initialization of your functions. For example, we've seen improvement when using ncc to bundle Node.js applications.

What we do however, is bundle all these dependencies, and our own code into a single JS file using the nifty ncc tool (thanks Vercel!)

Vercel's ncc compiler

The most unclear and confusing part is packing the code using ncc. The necessity of this step is caused by GitHub’s approach to running your Action.

I filed an issue for the ncc bundler regarding a similar behavior

This may be slightly tangential but I recently discovered ncc[1] from vercel which can take a single node project and compile it and all dependencies to a single file.

As an added benefit it also collapses all contained dependencies license files into a single licenses.txt file too!

- [1] https://github.com/vercel/ncc

The current process of building a package locally is by running through a gulp task, using ttypescript to compile the TS and @vercel/ncc to build the binary: