GitHub Actions Pitfalls

• act

  145 49,985 9.2 Go

  Run your GitHub Actions locally 🚀

  

If you want to run github actions locally before any pitfalls, you can try out

https://github.com/nektos/act

• actionlint

  5 2,346 9.4 Go

  :octocat: Static checker for GitHub Actions workflow files

The first pitfall can be statically detected with actionlint

https://github.com/rhysd/actionlint

$ actionlint oops.yaml

• WorkOS

  workos.com sponsored

  The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.

  

• roadmap

  66 7,688 0.0

  GitHub public roadmap

  

https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/555 Does this fix anything?

• combine-prs-workflow

  3 289 2.1

  Combine/group together PRs (for example from Dependabot and similar services)

  

Another pitfall I ran into recently with a workflow I've been working on [1]: Checks and CI that are made with GitHub Actions are reported to the new Checks API, while some (all?) external services report to their old Statuses API. This makes it needlessly difficult to ascertain whether a PR/branch is "green" or not. They finally decided to create a "statusRollUp" that combines the state of the two APIs, but it's not available in their REST api, only their GraphQL API.

[1] https://github.com/hrvey/combine-prs-workflow/

• runner

  58 4,476 9.1 C#

  The Runner for GitHub Actions :rocket:

  

Their self-hosted runners are pretty jank. If your workflow writes something to the docker container's user's home directory, you will see it in the next workflow you run. Due to this and other things, I need a "preamble" action that needs right after checkout. Oh, if don't checkout at the beginning of your workflow, you will be using the previous workflows copy of the repository.

I'm 100% sure they don't use this internally as these are glaring issues that impacts anyone using the self hosted runner. They also recommend running the container as root[1] instead of designing something more secure and sane.

1: https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/434#issuecomment-61...

• travis-yml

  1 110 6.2 Ruby

  Travis CI build config processing

  

More likely they hacked their YAML parser to treat on as a string.

At least that's what Travis CI folks did:

https://github.com/travis-ci/travis-yml#user-content-yaml

• gh-valet

  2 512 8.3 C#

  Discontinued Valet helps facilitate the migration of Azure DevOps, CircleCI, GitLab CI, Jenkins, and Travis CI pipelines to GitHub Actions.

  

GitHub also has a tool that will covert Jenkins pipelines (and other tooling) to Actions called Valet.

https://github.com/github/gh-valet

• InfluxDB

  www.influxdata.com sponsored

  Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.

  

• changed-files

  6 1,507 9.8 TypeScript

  :octocat: Github action to retrieve all (added, copied, modified, deleted, renamed, type changed, unmerged, unknown) files and directories.

  

• paths-filter

  8 1,792 6.2 TypeScript

  Conditionally run actions based on files modified by PR, feature branch or pushed commits

There’s an awkward gotcha/incompatibility between “Required status checks” and workflows that get skipped [1], eg due to setting a “paths” property of a push/pull_request workflow trigger [2].

The checks associated with the workflow don’t run and stay in a pending state, preventing the PR from being merged.

The only workaround I’m aware of is to use an action such as paths-filter [3] instead at the job level.

A further, related frustration/limitation - you can _only_ set the “paths” property [2] at the workflow level (i.e. not per-job), so those rules apply to all jobs in the workflow. Given that you can only build a DAG of jobs (ie “needs”) within a single workflow, it makes it quite difficult to do anything non trivial in a monorepo.

[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/repositories/configuring-branches...

[2]: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-workflows/workflow-...

[3]: https://github.com/dorny/paths-filter

• runner-images

  51 9,044 9.8 PowerShell

  GitHub Actions runner images

  

• just

  163 16,971 9.1 Rust

  🤖 Just a command runner

+1 for Justfiles[1]! They're a much saner alternative to makefiles with great shell support

[1] https://github.com/casey/just

Suggest a related project