toolkit VS checkout

Different libraries (like actions/toolkit and microsoft/azure-pipelines-task-lib) with more accessible and easy-to-use APIs are available out-of-box

I used the libraries from actions/toolkit to create my action. It's more comfortable than when I did it with Docker. I looked at all the libraries, and most of all: actions/core, actions/exec and actions/github.

The Action is built using TypeScript and Node.js, popular choices for GitHub Actions due to their excellent support for asynchronous operations, a crucial requirement considering the multiple I/O operations involved. In the initial setup, I used the actions/toolkit package which provides useful utilities to streamline the creation of GitHub Actions. I picked @actions/core for basic functionalities such as inputs, outputs, and error handling, @actions/github to interact with GitHub's REST API, and @actions/exec to execute shell commands.

The package @actions/github provides a hydrated Octokit.js client. Octokit.js is the SDK of GitHub and contains several subpackages like @octokit/rest and @octokit/graphql to interact with the REST or GraphQL API.

The GitHub Action was implemented with TypeScript using the GitHub Actions Toolkit and the OpenAI Node.js Library. The Action is activated on new comments on issues and pull requests if they mention @AdaGPT. The relevant issue number is determined from the event payload. Then all existing comments for this issue are read. If the issue is a pull request, the git diff is also read.

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.

Please support something like "allow-failure" for a given job

More than 2 years of ignoring requests to add an important feature (allow-failure) to Github Actions (ref, ref. When not ignoring, completely misunderstanding the feature as if those building Github Actions are unfamiliar with core features of competing platforms.

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.

If you re-run GHA after master changes, CI is testing over different code.

You can [disable](https://github.com/actions/checkout#checkout-pull-request-head-commit-instead-of-merge-commit) on the checkout action:

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There was an outage yesterday too when the GitHub action “checkout@v3” broke when they released “checkout@v4”

Yes, they broke the ability for GitHub CI to checkout repos…

https://github.com/actions/checkout/issues/1448

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.