GitHub Action Workflow Tips

I went through a Knowledge Transfer to a teammate who is implementing GitHub Actions and workflows in their repository. My team has been working with GitHub actions since they became available to developers. You can see my team’s workflows at https://github.com/IBM/FHIR/tree/main/.github/workflows and our automation scripts at https://github.com/IBM/FHIR/tree/main/build

Here are my tips:

Pushing Changes to GH Pages

If you need to push changes back to GitHub, I recommend you checkout your code to a working sub folder and build in that subfolder, and copy the artifacts back to another subfolder and then push those changes (after a git add and commit with signature back to git)

Triggering GH Pages Build

In my build and release process, I generate my own website artifacts. I then need to call the API to trigger the GH Pages workflow as it is not automatically triggered by pushing the artifacts directly to the gh-pages branch. This trick starts the deployment of the branch to the gh-pages environment. It uses curl and the git hubs api.

Grabbing the Current Tag

I found this helpful to grab the tag and inject it into the Git Hub Environment variables in subsequent Workflow Job steps.

Conditionally Skip based on a Label

You should be able to skip your workflow at any given point, and you can add a conditional to skip, for instance ci-skip which should be a label in your repo.

Capture your logs and Upload no matter what

Workflows are designed to skip dependent steps on failure, Step B fails because Step A failed. It’s worth adding at the end of your workflow a step to gather any debug logs and pack them up, upload in all conditions.

The condition is set with if: always().

Lock your ‘uses’ workflow versions

Lock in your workflow’s uses on a specific version. For instance, you can lock in on action/upload-artifact or action/checkout, and use the organization/repository to check the documentation on GitHub. Here are some key Actions and the links to their Repos.

action/checkout	checkout
action/upload-artifact	upload artifacts