typescript-action VS ncc

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.

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: