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We use GitHub Actions to build GitHub

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Re: We use GitHub Actions to build GitHub

#21

Post by havs »

Rapzid wrote: post #5

Hot take; they don't use their security alerts to manage dependency vulnerabilities. Sorry, taking this on a tangent but the security alerts feature as integrated into the product is WAY less usable than other features, such as actions. Just off the top of my head: * No way to assign alerts to people * No free-form comments when dismissing alerts? * Old alerts re-open if a regression introduces the change back.. With…

(Disclosure: current PM for Dependabot Alerts, currently working at GitHub)

You're right -- we haven't invested nearly enough in Dependabot Alerts. We're working to change that, starting with some foundational improvements like alert persistence, which shipped in February. (https://github.blog/2022-02-08-improving-developer-experienc...)

After our recent ship, we're in good shape to start addressing some of your concerns, like greater clarity through an alert's lifecycle or comments with dismissal.

Would love to hear any additional feedback. Let me know!

Re: We use GitHub Actions to build GitHub

#22

Post by saurik »

stickfigure wrote: post #16

GitHub Actions has a lot of basic usability issues, none of which are fatal but all of which irritate me on a daily basis. Let's start with the first and simplest: Why did my build fail? You'd think this should be front and center. Yet, the UX is "click through a couple links, then wade through thousands of lines of log output". In practice this is "download the logs and grep them for text strings like FAILURE". The…

FWIW, while the UI for re-running jobs used to be better, the result was a LOT worse as it would re-run all the jobs instead of just the failing ones, so I am still MUCH happier with the new flow ;P.

Re: We use GitHub Actions to build GitHub

#23

Post by OJFord »

stickfigure wrote: post #16

GitHub Actions has a lot of basic usability issues, none of which are fatal but all of which irritate me on a daily basis. Let's start with the first and simplest: Why did my build fail? You'd think this should be front and center. Yet, the UX is "click through a couple links, then wade through thousands of lines of log output". In practice this is "download the logs and grep them for text strings like FAILURE". The…

If you're already putting your own frontend on it in Slack, you could add a 're-run' button to that failure notification that hits the API for that? (I assume there is one.)

There's a weird DSL for buttons/layout in Slack, but it works, and obviously it's pretty easily testable, just fire the examples at your own endpoint and tweak it until it does what you want.

My own main frustration with Actions is just that the docs are bad, making it hard to configure.

Re: We use GitHub Actions to build GitHub

#24

Post by savanaly »

stickfigure wrote: post #16

GitHub Actions has a lot of basic usability issues, none of which are fatal but all of which irritate me on a daily basis. Let's start with the first and simplest: Why did my build fail? You'd think this should be front and center. Yet, the UX is "click through a couple links, then wade through thousands of lines of log output". In practice this is "download the logs and grep them for text strings like FAILURE". The…

This is why UI is hard. In a parallel universe they made the re-run jobs button like you want, and there's some person at the top of the Hacker News comments in that universe making the complaint that it's too hard to tell what the buttons do, and that only the common path of rebuilding failed builds is easy and once you need to do something uncommon it becomes irritatingly complex.

Re: We use GitHub Actions to build GitHub

#25

Post by lapser »

newman314 wrote: post #18
ethomson wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback! I'm one of the PMs for GitHub Actions, and I appreciate this. Thinking about Actions as a set of primitives that you can compose is very much how I think about the product (and I think the other PMs as well) so I'm glad that resonates. We're always welcome to feedback, and we're continuing to invest and improve on the product, so I'm hopeful that we can address the features that you're missin…

Here's my ask: * Setting up GHA is still a lot of "commit and hope for the best". I've resorted to having a sandbox repo just for experimentation/testing so that I don't overly pollute repos that I actually care about. It would be great to get more instrumentation to see what is going on. * I have a monorepo for Dockerfiles. It's quite annoying that I have to have separate invocations for different Dockerfiles in dep…

> Setting up GHA is still a lot of "commit and hope for the best". I've resorted to having a sandbox repo just for experimentation/testing so that I don't overly pollute repos that I actually care about. It would be great to get more instrumentation to see what is going on.

There is act[0] which aims to let you run github actions locally via Docker. It isn't perfect but it does a decent job at it, and for the most part your pipeline can be run locally.

After MS bought GH, I had hopes that they would build a tool to run action locally, but nothing yet.

[0] https://github.com/nektos/act

Re: We use GitHub Actions to build GitHub

#26

Post by OJFord »

ethomson wrote: post #12
danpalmer wrote: post #6

I've used GitHub Actions quite extensively now, across infrastructure automation, Python CI/CD, and iOS CI/CD, and while not perfect, it's the best platform I've used for this stuff so far. Compared to Jenkins it needed far less maintenance. Compared to CircleCI it felt much easier to work with and to build reliable pipelines due to the locking primitives it provides, and compared to Semaphore I found it easier to un…

Thanks for the feedback! I'm one of the PMs for GitHub Actions, and I appreciate this. Thinking about Actions as a set of primitives that you can compose is very much how I think about the product (and I think the other PMs as well) so I'm glad that resonates. We're always welcome to feedback, and we're continuing to invest and improve on the product, so I'm hopeful that we can address the features that you're missin…

That's very much how I think about it too, which is why it frustrates me that I can't create canned workflows that apply to all my repos of a certain type (language specific linting and releasing say).

I know I can create user/organisation templates, but all that does is put it in the UI chooser to create a commit to put it in the repo from the web. I want to do something like `include: OJFord/workflows/terraform-provider.yml` or `include: OJFord/workflows/rust.yml`

Perhaps even better would be I don't even have to specify that in the repo, they just apply automatically to any which match a given pattern - named `terraform-provider-*` or having a file `Cargo.toml` say - but I realise that's probably too big a deviation from the way Actions works at this point.

Re: We use GitHub Actions to build GitHub

#27

Post by OJFord »

lapser wrote: post #25
newman314 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my ask: * Setting up GHA is still a lot of "commit and hope for the best". I've resorted to having a sandbox repo just for experimentation/testing so that I don't overly pollute repos that I actually care about. It would be great to get more instrumentation to see what is going on. * I have a monorepo for Dockerfiles. It's quite annoying that I have to have separate invocations for different Dockerfiles in dep…

> Setting up GHA is still a lot of "commit and hope for the best". I've resorted to having a sandbox repo just for experimentation/testing so that I don't overly pollute repos that I actually care about. It would be great to get more instrumentation to see what is going on. There is act[0] which aims to let you run github actions locally via Docker. It isn't perfect but it does a decent job at it, and for the most pa…

I've had no luck reproducing problems in Actions with act, and the rest of the time have problems in act that I don't in Actions it seems.

I like the idea and also would like something first-party, but I imagine it's hard and GitHub would want it to be less buggy than act is, and maybe they're trying but it's not there.

Tbh even if it ran remotely in actual Actions, but just didn't show up in the repo UI, logged locally, that would be fine?

Re: We use GitHub Actions to build GitHub

#28

Post by bbrree66 »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #17

" Turn weekly team photos into GIFs and upload to README" Well, as a remote worker that has my camera off as much as possible out of principle I'd really hate this. It actually puts me off applying knowing glimpses of my home get turned into GIFs for the entire company to see.

No post body was provided.

Re: We use GitHub Actions to build GitHub

#30

Post by bastardoperator »

stickfigure wrote: post #16

GitHub Actions has a lot of basic usability issues, none of which are fatal but all of which irritate me on a daily basis. Let's start with the first and simplest: Why did my build fail? You'd think this should be front and center. Yet, the UX is "click through a couple links, then wade through thousands of lines of log output". In practice this is "download the logs and grep them for text strings like FAILURE". The…

Why would you want to context shift to a UI anyways? I would argue slack is a better place to get notifications.
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