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GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

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Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#11

Post by bravura »

penagwin wrote: post #8
pm90 wrote: post #5

I would hesitate to build on anything that relies on GitHub native tooling. GitHub support is absolutely the worst. Their tools fail in weird ways at times, and without support you will be stuck. For personal/non production apps, fine. But beware of using it as a core part of your infrastructure.

Thanks for the warning, are there any good tools that integrate with pull request checks that can be self hosted? We self host nearly everything at work except for github. (And it's VERY difficult for me to get anything that costs money approved regardless of price)

And it's VERY difficult for me to get anything that costs money approved regardless of price

For me, this is a big red flag.

Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#12

Post by louib »

I had to setup CI for a GitHub open source project recently, and decided to give GitHub Actions a try. I have to say it's pretty nice to have the CI directly handled by GH (GitLab has been doing it for years, I know...). I hope it's gonna help some open source projects to easily add CI validations to their PR workflow.

That being said, there was only Ubuntu images for the Linux builds, and I'm not aware of a way to run custom containers at the moment.

Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#13

Post by ccleve »

I have spent the last two days fighting with these new Github tools. I've been trying to do a simple Hello-World Maven app, built on Github Actions and deployed to Github Packages. It does not work.

Github documentation is a disaster. They leave out critical parts. They don't provide examples. Everything they write is terse, confusing, and incomplete.

They have short little articles on how to do things, and for each sub-task they have a link to docs somewhere else. This would be fine, except the links don't point to anything useful.

To give an example: they say you can use the Github API to talk to Github Packages, but the link goes to their generic GraphQL documentation. They don't point to any reference material on the actual calls to the packages service. If it exists, I can't find it.

If you go to the main page in your account for Github Packages, it says that all you have to do is this:

mvn deploy -Dregistry=https://maven.pkg.github.com/mycompany -Dtoken=GH_TOKEN

That is just straight-out wrong. It does not work.

Seriously, Github, you need to fire your documentation team and hire some people who know how to write. Perhaps you should hire people who have actually used your tools to write the docs. Or just provide some freakin' working examples.

Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#14

Post by kureikain »

Github actions is nice but I think they go to wrong direction. The way they work is you are given an image then you have to use a thing call Github action, which basically just to extract out into YAML to define a certain steps for install any dependencies, execute shell script ...

I don't know why they didn't allow us to use any docker image we want so we don't have to waste time to use actions to install dependencies...Eg, if your app depend on both Go, Ruby, Node at build time you will need:

https://github.com/actions/setup-go https://github.com/actions/setup-node https://github.com/actions/setup-ruby

I much prefer CircleCI way

Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#16

Post by kwhat4 »

ccleve wrote: post #13

I have spent the last two days fighting with these new Github tools. I've been trying to do a simple Hello-World Maven app, built on Github Actions and deployed to Github Packages. It does not work. Github documentation is a disaster. They leave out critical parts. They don't provide examples. Everything they write is terse, confusing, and incomplete. They have short little articles on how to do things, and for each…

I have had the complete opposite experience. Github actions was far easier to setup and get running than AWS CodePipeline or Jenkins. I must admit, I have not gotten down to the nitty gritty API level documentation, but for simple building & testing, it has been a godsend.

Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#17

Post by wescarpenter »

kej wrote: post #6
itcrowd wrote: post #2

What's up with so many YouTube video's (including this one) having ALL CAPS titles?! It makes me not want to watch them, although it may be different for the general public for some reason ... ??

It's because YOU WILL NOTICE THIS ONE in a list of other normal text

I GUESS WE'LL JUST

HAVE TO WAIT UNTIL

EVERY ONE LOOKS LIKE THIS

so then this one

WILL STAND OUT AGAIN?

Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#18

Post by kwhat4 »

kureikain wrote: post #14

Github actions is nice but I think they go to wrong direction. The way they work is you are given an image then you have to use a thing call Github action, which basically just to extract out into YAML to define a certain steps for install any dependencies, execute shell script ... I don't know why they didn't allow us to use any docker image we want so we don't have to waste time to use actions to install dependenci…

> I don't know why they didn't allow us to use any docker image we want

Can you imagine allowing anyone on the internet to run an arbitrary container on your server for free?

Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#19

Post by ccleve »

kwhat4 wrote: post #16
ccleve wrote: post #13

I have spent the last two days fighting with these new Github tools. I've been trying to do a simple Hello-World Maven app, built on Github Actions and deployed to Github Packages. It does not work. Github documentation is a disaster. They leave out critical parts. They don't provide examples. Everything they write is terse, confusing, and incomplete. They have short little articles on how to do things, and for each…

I have had the complete opposite experience. Github actions was far easier to setup and get running than AWS CodePipeline or Jenkins. I must admit, I have not gotten down to the nitty gritty API level documentation, but for simple building & testing, it has been a godsend.

I did, in fact, get the build server to work. Posting the resulting artifacts to Github Packages has been the big problem.

Re: GitHub Actions is my new favorite free programming tool [video]

#20

Post by ComputerGuru »

ccleve wrote: post #13

I have spent the last two days fighting with these new Github tools. I've been trying to do a simple Hello-World Maven app, built on Github Actions and deployed to Github Packages. It does not work. Github documentation is a disaster. They leave out critical parts. They don't provide examples. Everything they write is terse, confusing, and incomplete. They have short little articles on how to do things, and for each…

I am with you on this. It seems to be a new trend: “show users how to do a hello world” which was disregarded in the past... but somehow that turned into “instead of providing real documentation” rather than “in addition to.”

It’s not just GitHub. There’s a language I (and the rest of HN) love that has adopted “story format” for documentation but is missing real, hard technical documentation apart from method-level codedocs. It’s nice for building momentum but it leaves you unable to find a central location with an architectural documentation of the system.

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