rust-github-action-template VS typescript-action

This section highlights the worst part of Rust today—it is still a very young programming language, so it's missing a lot of resources available to other languages. After this project, I made a template and a corresponding blog post so that future developers (probably me) will have a much easier time implementing Rust actions. However, this template wasn't available to me yet, so it doesn't count for this experiment.

My little cargo-generate template will hopefully make it easier than ever to write Rust-based GitHub actions. If you try it out and have any suggestions or questions, please open an issue on the repository. If you want to hear more about the motivation for this template—why I'm writing actions in Rust instead of TypeScript, follow me for that upcoming post!

While learning about GitHub Actions, I came across the GitHub Actions Org, and they have a bunch of templates for building custom GitHub actions. So, I started searching for a template that has TypeScript support, ensuring type safety to write bug-free code. I found the typescript-action template that includes support for tests, linter, versioning, and more.

This is the template I used for my TypeScript action https://github.com/actions/typescript-action

I found the GitHub actions documentation easier to read than Azure, so I would recommend starting writing and testing your extensions on GitHub by using the official template actions/typescript-action. The mentioned template provides a good starting point; I won't repeat the steps here. Play with it, write some simple stuff, and then return here for the next steps.

GitHub maintain a set of repos called actions. One of which is called cache.

To get started quickly with a JavaScript action, I recommend using the official templates from GitHub for JavaScript and TypeScript.

On the TypeScript side, setup was much easier. There was already a template from GitHub that took care of the basics. Most of the time spent here was updating dependencies and getting my editor to play nicely with it—18 minutes, about 10% of the total.

Now that you know how to create your own GitHub Actions, why not give it a try? Head to the GitHub Marketplace and start exploring the existing Actions, or create your own and share it with the community. With GitHub Actions, the possibilities are endless, so start building and see what you can accomplish

Your build most likely fails because your tests fail. Most CI pipelines today, like Jenkins, Circleci, GitLab, TeamCity, Bamboo, and GitHub Actions, are configured to automatically cause the build process to fail when tests fail.