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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]

#71

Post by stevehawk »

ethomson wrote: post #68
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…

Product Manager for GitHub Actions here. Sorry that this was difficult for you - we're continuing to work on our documentation for both GitHub Actions and Github Packages (and how to use them together) and we'll make sure that we improve this. For my Java project, I set up GitHub Packages as a server in my settings.xml, and then use: mvn deploy -Dgithub.username=${{github.actor}} -Dgithub.password=${{github.token}} -…

Y'all might be better served by just throwing out a chunk of what you have. When my customer said they wanted to have automated deployments of their webapp to AWS (where branch name = subdomain.dev.customer.com) it took me waaay too long to set it up. It seemed like a lot of your docs would provide examples that were already outdated based on the product being in beta. I assume they're still wrong though because I wrapped up the project 2 days before you left beta and I remember thinking "holy crap, they were that close to being live and the docs were still that bad?"

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

#72

Post by clarkbw »

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…

Sorry you've been fighting this. We're actively working on the documentation as well as improving the setup workflows for Actions which should alleviate lots of this pain.

Those one line snippets are likely going to be taken down, most systems are too complicated for those to work. It looks nice for a couple package systems but that Maven one is obviously flawed.

I'd be happy to help you dig through whatever you're trying to do; I'm @clarkbw on twitter. I'd also love another set of eyes on the changes to the setup-java action, specifically getting Maven authentication to work well.

https://github.com/actions/setup-java/pull/29

(I'm the PM heading up the Packages project at GitHub)

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

#73

Post by TheFiend7 »

stevehawk wrote: post #70
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…

> Github documentation is a disaster. They leave out critical parts. They don't provide examples. Everything they write is terse, confusing, and incomplete. Agreed. A lot of times they seemed to use the ole "make a blog post about X and we'll call it documentation" strategy that a lot of others seem to be employing as well. The net result is useless documentation that is often outdated by the time a product is live.…

While I do agree with you, I've found often times a good ol blog post with an example connecting some dots can be very productive.

But I do agree with you that it's very from from being an alternative, and instead should be used to supplement healthy documentation.

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

#74

Post by amdelamar »

Only thing I don't like about GitHub Actions so far is the YAML structure. e.g.

    name: master-pull-request
    on:
      pull_request:
        branches:
          - master
    jobs:
      test:
        name: run tests
        runs-on: ubuntu-18.04
        steps:
          - uses: actions/checkout@v1
          - name: Run gradle test
            run: |
              ./gradlew test
I much prefer Drone CI's YAML:

    kind: pipeline
    name: default
    steps:
      - name: run tests
        image: openjdk:8-jdk-slim # Docker images!
        commands:
        - ./gradlew test

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

#75

Post by jrochkind1 »

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 similar experiences with Github Actions docs, alas. Lots of pages linking to lots of other pages, none with much useful content. Keep thinking the content that will actually explain what the heck is going on is around the corner... then I realize I've wound up linked back to a page that was already in my history! Wasn't sure if the docs were assuming some kind of domain knowledge I didn't have (like maybe if I knew docker better, or had experience with circleci or something?) -- kind of reassured to hear it's not just me!

I haven't really tried to do anything with Github Actions, I start looking at the docs and think, nah, not ready yet.

It does seem like a powerful tool.

It turns out that good docs is hard and "expensive", can't be handled as an afterthought without actually investing time/resources. A powerful complex tool that took a while to develop is gonna need a similar significant investment in docs.

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

#76

Post by munk-a »

aassddffasdf wrote: post #23
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…

Umm, GraphQL is a reflective API-- use 'introspection': https://graphql.org/learn/introspection/

This same sort of introspection and auto-discovery was an original tenant of REST that's mostly ignored these days and I'm happy for that - I've never seen this sort of thing work well because it assuming you're able to translate data points into unambiguous identifiers. So the company object has a name object, I might assume that's the name of the company, but what if it's the registration number of the company - does it include legal suffixes? Maybe it's the name of the majority owner and this company object is related to the stock market. Let's take a more fun example, some sort of grocery service that lists "price" does price include tax? Is it in USD? Is the price in dollars or cents? Are all prices in the same currency? Is the price the cost to the end user or the cost to fulfill inventory on a unit basis? Does the price include discounts - if there is a "price" and "sale_percentage" column then has the sale percentage already been applied - how does that sale_percentage work, is .2 for sale_percentage mean there is a 20% or 80% discount - considering it was built by programmers it'd probably mean an 80% discount but that's not what a layman would assume.

Introspection is not valid in place of documentation.

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

#77

Post by jrochkind1 »

penagwin wrote: post #65
bravura wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I should probably emphasize that it's difficult for me to get new things approved, but if we NEED it then money is not a problem. The response I get is we don't _NEED_ a CI/CD (and haven't had one for years), so they would rather I find a solution that can run on our hardware for free. I'll add that I enjoy my work environment and they treat me very well, I'm young and I'm known to "like shiny new things". I also hav…

> The response I get is we don't _NEED_ a CI/CD

You are not making this sound like less of a red flag!

But yeah, if you are both new and young there, you can't just push hard for all the things you want. But in this case... you're right, heh.

If I were you, I'd be keeping my eyes out for job opportunities in environments where you can actually learn something about good modern software engineering practices form their example. (Easier said then done, don't I know it).

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

#78

Post by SahAssar »

ethomson wrote: post #68
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…

Product Manager for GitHub Actions here. Sorry that this was difficult for you - we're continuing to work on our documentation for both GitHub Actions and Github Packages (and how to use them together) and we'll make sure that we improve this. For my Java project, I set up GitHub Packages as a server in my settings.xml, and then use: mvn deploy -Dgithub.username=${{github.actor}} -Dgithub.password=${{github.token}} -…

I've converted our teams CI/CD to use github actions (from mostly running on AWS) at a large company since early in the beta, but we have also run into a lot of issues. Where can I report these issues and get a real answer? I don't mind getting told that a certain feature is on the backburner, I just want to know that someone has considered it.

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

#79

Post by maxdo »

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.

Gitlab ci is a direct competitor and they are much more advanced for CI

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

#80

Post by STRiDEX »

phodge wrote: post #59
jpxw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you’re talking about Go here?

Possibly Typescript. Try finding documentation for the bundled "Record" type. It seems you're supposed to just know how to use it already.

I've heard the same typescript feedback from coworkers. Another commenter already linked to the official docs, I always link them to https://github.com/sindresorhus/type-fest#readme which has links and docs of the built in types and can be installed for more.
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