memoir/pages/infrastructure/github-actions/composite-actions.md

tags
Github Actions DRY

Composite Actions

Often we reuse steps inside our different github actions. As we generally want to follow DRY principles (and are lazy), which means every duplicated step has potential for improvement.

There is also a good guide/tutorial by James Wallis, which this is mainly inspired by.

Composite Actions vs Reusable Workflows

Within Github actions there are two ways to achieve that: Composite Actions and Reusable Workflows. Here is a good comparison by cardinalby.

Key Points of Composite Actions

• Can live in the same repository, but can also be outsourced into it's own.
• Share the same filesystem -> no build artifacts need to be passed around.
• Secrets cannot be accessed directly, need to be passed.
• Each action has to have it's own directory with an action.yaml file inside it.
• When executing raw commands we need to specify the shell we are running in.

Example

The example will show how to extract a part of a github action to a composite action. In this case: building some LaTeX files.

.github/
├── actions
│   └── build
│       └── action.yaml
└── workflows
    ├── preview.yml
    └── release.yml

name: 'Latex Builder'
description: 'Checkout and build LaTeX files.'

inputs:
  # As we cannot access secrets directly, they must be passed
  github-token:
    description: 'GitHub token for authentication.'
    required: true

runs:
  using: 'composite' # This is the magic
  steps:
    - uses: actions/cache@v3
      name: Tectonic Cache
      with:
        path: ~/.cache/Tectonic
        key: ${{ runner.os }}-tectonic-${{ hashFiles('**/*.tex') }}
        restore-keys: |
          ${{ runner.os }}-tectonic-          
    - uses: wtfjoke/setup-tectonic@v2
      with:
        github-token: ${{ inputs.github-token }}
    - name: Run Tectonic
      run: make tectonic
      shell: bash # This would not be required in the normal action file

name: 'Preview'

on:
  # ...

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: ./.github/actions/build
        with:
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

      - name: Upload PDFs
        uses: actions/upload-artifact@v2
        with:
          name: PDFs
          path: '*.pdf'

name: 'Release'

on:
  # ...

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: ./.github/actions/build
        with:
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

      - name: Release
        uses: ncipollo/release-action@v1
        with:
          allowUpdates: true
          artifacts: '*.pdf'
          token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Gotchas

• If we use a local composite action, the actions/checkout@v3 step cannot be inside the composite action, as the step itself is inside the repository, so it does not exist yet in the run.