141–150 of 284 posts
> no way of running actions locally My policy is to never let pipeline DSLs contain any actual logic outside orchestration for the task, relying solely on one-liner build or test commands. If the task is more complicated than a one-liner, make a script for it in the repo to make it a one-liner. Doesn't matter if it's GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Azure DevOps (which has super cursed yaml), etc. This in turn means that you…
If it's not open source, I have no idea why you'd use GitHub at all. (And even then.)
Keep your eggs in your own nest.
> The problem is that this step will only run when I change something in the web-app1 folder. So if my pull request only made changes in api1 I will never be able to merge my pull request! This just seems like a bad implementation to me? There are definitely ways to set up your actions so that they run all of the unit tests without changes if you'd like, or so that api1's unit tests are not required for a web-app1 re…
Absolutely correct. When creating a new workflow, I always disable push/pull_request triggered builds and instead use the manually triggered `workflow_dispatch` method. This makes testing a new workflow much easier. Additionally, you can use conditionals based on inputs in the `workflow_dispatch` meaning that you could easily setup a "skip api tests" or "include web tests" option.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The actual subtle issue here is that sometimes you actually need CI features around caching and the like, so you are forced to engage with the format a bit. You can, of course, chew it down to a bare minimum. But I really wish more CI systems would just show up with "you configure us with scripts" instead of the "declarative" nonsense.
CI that isn't running on your servers wants very deep understanding of how your process works so they can minimize their costs (this is true whether or not you pay for using CI)
The ideal for me is (this is very silly and glib and a total category error) LSP but for CI. Tooling that is relatively normalized, letting me (for example) have a pytest plugin that "does sharding" cleanly across multiple CI operators.
There's some stuff and conventions already of course, but in particular caching and spinning up jobs dynamically are still not there.
Re: monorepo > In GitHub you can specify a "required check", the name of the step in your pipeline that always has to be green before a pull request is merged. As an example, I can say that web-app1 - Unit tests are required to pass. The problem is that this step will only run when I change something in the web-app1 folder. So if my pull request only made changes in api1 I will never be able to merge my pull request!…
I agree hardware should be that quick, but CI and cloud hardware is woefully underpowered unless you actively seek it out. I’ve also never seen a test framework spew out even close to that in practice. I’m not even sure most frameworks would do that with noop tests, which is sad.
One really interesting omission to this post is how the architecture of GitHub actions encourages (or at the very least makes deceivingly easy) making bad security decisions. Common examples are secrets. Organization or repository secrets are very convenient, but they are also massive security holes just waiting for unsuspecting victims to fall into. Repository environments have the ability to have distinct secrets,…
I guess what I’m saying is, it’s GHA all the way down.
A lot of folks in this thread are focusing on the monorepo aspect of things. The "Pull request and required checks" problem exists regardless of monorepo or not. GitHub Actions allows you to only run checks if certain conditions are met, like "only lint markdown if the PR contains *.md files". The moment you decide to use such rules, you have the "Pull request and required checks" problem. No "monorepo" required. Git…
Also: I'm not asserting that the below is good, just that it works.
First, don't make every check a required check. You probably don't need to require that linting of your markdown files passes (maybe you do! it's an example).
Second, consider not using the `on::paths`, but instead something like `dorny/paths-filter`. Your workflow now runs every time; a no-op takes substantially less than 1 minute unless you have a gargantuan repo.
Third, make all of your workflows have a 'success' job that just runs and succeeds. Again, this will take less than 1 minute.
At this point, a no-op is still likely taking less than 1 minute, so it will bill at 1 minute, which is going to be $.008 if you're paying.
Fourth, you can use `needs` and `if` now to control when your 'success' job runs. Yes, managing the `if` can be tricky, but it does work.
We are in the middle of a very large migration into GitHub Actions from a self-hosted GitLab. It was something we chose, but also due to some corporate choices our options were essentially GitHub Actions or a massive rethink of CI for several dozen projects. We have already moved into code generation for some aspects of GitHub Actions code, and that's the fifth and perhaps final frontier for addressing this situation. Figure out how to describe a graph and associated completion requirements for your workflow(s), and write something to translate that into the `if` statements for your 'success' jobs.
> no way of running actions locally My policy is to never let pipeline DSLs contain any actual logic outside orchestration for the task, relying solely on one-liner build or test commands. If the task is more complicated than a one-liner, make a script for it in the repo to make it a one-liner. Doesn't matter if it's GitHub Actions, Jenkins, Azure DevOps (which has super cursed yaml), etc. This in turn means that you…
This is one thing I really love about Buildkite[0] -- being able to run the agent locally. (Full disclosure: I also work for Buildkite.) The Buildkite agent runs as a normal process too (rather than as a Docker container), which makes the process of workflow development way simpler, IMO. I also keep a handful of agents running locally on my laptop for personal projects, which is nice. (Why run those processes on someone else's infra if I don't have to?)
>Reusability and YAML
This is another one that I believe is unique to Buildkite and that I also find super useful. You can write your workflows in YAML of course -- but you can also write them in your language of choice, and then serialize to YAML or JSON when you're ready to start the run (or even add onto the run as it's running if you need to). This lets you encapsulate and reuse (and test, etc.) workflow logic as you need. We have many large customers that do some amazing things with this capability.
> My team consists of about 15 engineers If it's not open source, I have no idea why you'd use GitHub at all. (And even then.) Keep your eggs in your own nest.