setup-buildx-action VS upload-artifact

Good luck running this locally. There's no script code to speak of, just references to external "actions" and parameters (for example, https://github.com/docker/setup-buildx-action).

Some CI platforms are just a simple glue layer (Gitlab CI - which I prefer - is one of them), but in most cases Github CI is not. Maybe it adds to the author frustration?

Set up Docker Buildx: We will use the docker/setup-buildx-action action to set up Docker Buildx.

There’s an amazing docker/bake-action which makes it insanely easy to build all of your containers in the most optimal way. Since we’ve set the group “default” block in the docker-bake.hcl, config is very minimal. One step in your GitHub Action workflow file will build all of your images and will push all of your cache layers, tag all of your containers, and push all your final images. You’ll still have to do things like checkout the code and don’t forget that you’ll want to use the docker/setup-buildx-action since bake is a buildx feature. There’s one quick gotcha for the actual docker/bake-action. We don’t want to push PR builds and we don’t want to pollute the cache with PR builds.

To be clear, that article does NOT provide a solution for avoiding QEMU. I suggested it because it describes "the hard way" to get a single image multi-arch image. The github action crazy-max/ghaction-docker-buildx has been archived and replaced by docker/setup-qemu-action and docker/setup-buildx-action, which it seems like you were already using.

Third step is docker/setup-buildx-action configures buildx, which is a Docker CLI plugin that provides enhanced build capabilities.

We then use the docker/setup-buildx-action action to initialize an environment to build Docker images:

The setup-buildx-action configures Docker Buildx to create a builder instance for running the image build. The following step build-push-action, makes use of that instance to build your Docker image. The build-push-action supports all of the features provided by BuildKit out of the box. In our simple example, we are only specifying the Docker context, but more advanced features like SSH, secrets, and build args are supported.

# Get the repository's code - name: Checkout uses: actions/checkout@v2 # https://github.com/docker/setup-qemu-action - name: Set up QEMU uses: docker/setup-qemu-action@v1 # https://github.com/docker/setup-buildx-action - name: Set up Docker Buildx id: buildx uses: docker/setup-buildx-action@v1

docker/setup-buildx-action@v1 - we use it to setup the docker builder

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.