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GitHub Actions could be so much better

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Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#161

Post by Tainnor »

withinboredom wrote: post #160
MoreQARespect wrote: post #24

There are two types of github actions workflows you can build. 1) Program with github actions. Google "how can I send an email with github actions?" and then plug in some marketplace tool to do it. Your workflows grow to 500-1000 lines and start having all sorts of nonsense like conditionals and the YAML becomes disgusting and hard to understand. Github actions becomes a nightmare and you've invited vendor lock in. 2…

I appreciate this perspective, however, after spending 6mo on a project that went (2) all the way, never again. CI/CD SHOULD NOT be using the same scripts you build with locally. Now, we have a commit that every dev must apply to the makefile to build locally, and if you accidentally push it, CI/CD will blow up (requiring an interactive rebase before every push). However, you can’t build locally without that commit.…

This comment is hard to address without understanding the details of your project, but I will at least say that it doesn't mirror my experience.

Generally, I would use the same tools (e.g. ./gradlew build or docker build) to build stuff locally as on CI, and config params are typically enough to distinguish what needs to be different.

My CI scripts still tend up to be more complicated than I'd like to (due to things like caching, artifacts, code insights, triggers, etc.), but the main build logic at least is extracted.

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#162

Post by Tainnor »

taeric wrote: post #54
ghayes wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge portion of my actions are for things like caching or publishing artifacts, which are unique to actions itself.

I'd assume you would be able to publish and deploy locally before setting up actions. Such that those are likely targets in your build system? Caching, I can mostly understand as unique there. Though, I think I'm living with whatever the default stuff in actions is. Slow for builds that don't happen often, of course, but not so slow that I care.

Unfortunately, my team has some builds that take ~25 min without caching and maybe 2 min with caching.

I'm still not entirely sure why it's the case, but the connection to the package registry is incredibly slow, so downloading all dependencies takes forever.

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#163

Post by taeric »

Tainnor wrote: post #162
taeric wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd assume you would be able to publish and deploy locally before setting up actions. Such that those are likely targets in your build system? Caching, I can mostly understand as unique there. Though, I think I'm living with whatever the default stuff in actions is. Slow for builds that don't happen often, of course, but not so slow that I care.

Unfortunately, my team has some builds that take ~25 min without caching and maybe 2 min with caching. I'm still not entirely sure why it's the case, but the connection to the package registry is incredibly slow, so downloading all dependencies takes forever.

I'm fortunate that worrying about 25 minute builds just doesn't matter. The long pole on all builds is still the code review that goes with it, such that I just don't care about getting that time too low here.

That is, I am assuming that a CI build is not on the immediate dev loop, such that the person pushing it doesn't have to wait for the build before they prepare a review on it.

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#166

Post by davidmurdoch »

EddTheSDET wrote: post #111
MoreQARespect wrote: post #24

There are two types of github actions workflows you can build. 1) Program with github actions. Google "how can I send an email with github actions?" and then plug in some marketplace tool to do it. Your workflows grow to 500-1000 lines and start having all sorts of nonsense like conditionals and the YAML becomes disgusting and hard to understand. Github actions becomes a nightmare and you've invited vendor lock in. 2…

How DO you debug your actions? I spend so long in the commit-action-debug-change loop it’s absurd. I agree with your point re: 2 wholeheartedly though, it makes debugging scripts so much easier too. CI should be runnable locally and GitHub actions, while supported with some tooling, still isn’t very easy to work with like that.

My GH Actions debugging usually devolves into `git commit -m "wtfqwehsjsidbfjdi"`

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#167

Post by Aeolun »

pests wrote: post #141
giobox wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks, I'm aware of this option too, but if you say have an HTML report with the results of 200 tests, no one has time to write some logic to parse the results to a markdown summary frankly. Just give me the link! Similar too if the reporting captures video/screenshots of a given bug - the original report UI is far easier to deal with. Many test frameworks already natively put out an HTML report UI etc, it's just ha…

> an HTML report with the results of 200 tests, no one has time to write some logic to parse the results to a markdown summary frankly. Not sure how GHA treats it, but markdown is a subset of HTML so by default all HTML pages are valid Markdown documents. No conversion required.

They just don’t show half of the stuff inside correctly.

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#168

Post by jahsome »

Pxtl wrote: post #18

I mean GH Actions is basically a re-brand of Microsoft's "Azure Pipelines". As somebody who used all previous incarnations of TFS/VSTS/AzDO build and release pipelines: they are not good at this . This is not a team with a record of success. That Azure Pipelines is moderately usable only happened because they failed literally every other approach they tried. There was a project to allow you to run the pipelines local…

You had me up til that last paragraph.

Call me crazy but xml just hurts my eyes. I'll always take a nicely formatted yaml doc with all the pains that come with it over the horrors of angle brackets and camel case.

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#169

Post by Aeolun »

giobox wrote: post #84
chrissoundz wrote: post #79

Struggling with this today, and numerous other days. It's so bad. Stop trying to build an operating system out of YAML. I'll always use and recommend Gitlab from now on. And what the earth is an "actions" anyway? How on earth is simple bash functions not just as suitable here? Instead you have some weird YAML scripting language. It's so bad. Why. Somebody please tell me. I'm losing my mind. It is a good reflection of…

Executing bash statements/scripts/functions is the thing I struggle least with in GH actions personally, it's remarkably easy to execute shell steps. If you really want your entire build to be a shellscript the action executes, you can do just that with very little YAML.

Except it doesn’t execute quite like in bash, and every single command is it’s own little island.

So exporting an environment variable doesn’t work for example.

Re: GitHub Actions could be so much better

#170

Post by Aeolun »

remram wrote: post #152

Can I trigger a workflow from a different workflow yet? That seems very basic, and last time I looked I had to create a token that gives read/write access to every repo in every organization to do this. And then it didn't work because the docs for the trigger API is apparently wrong.

As long as they’re in the same repository, yeah.
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