A Couple Tips on GitHub Actions
July 5, 2021
I work primarily on a Linux machine, and for a while now I've wanted to set up the GitHub actions for my flashcards CLI so that the tests can be run on Mac and Windows, because I honestly have no idea if the program will run correctly on those operating systems. The CLI is written in Python and so the main workings of it shouldn't be an issue; I was more concerned with storing and accessing the sqlite database that underpins it. (And in fact was 95% sure that how I entered its path would at least cause a failure on Windows.) Today I finally got around to doing that, although I didn't find the process exactly straightforward. Perhaps that's because I was skimming through the documentation too quickly and trying to find one particular thing, but in any case, here is how I was able to set it up.
I already had a "workflow" set up that ran tests on the Linux virtual environment (Ubuntu) that GH offers, and so I needed to update that. But before I changed that, I wanted to see if I could manually run the workflow, so I didn't have to push a new commit just to have it run. So I changed the code from:
# this is just a snippet of the larger file
on:
push:
branches: [ main ]
pull_request:
branches: [ main ]
to:
# this is just a snippet of the larger file
on:
push:
branches: [ main ]
pull_request:
branches: [ main ]
workflow_dispatch:
It turned out that was correct, although it wasn't immediate obvious that it was, because when I returned to the main Actions page, I didn't see the "This workflow has a workflow_dispatch event trigger" text with the "Run workflow" next to it, like I should have. I think this is because I did it on a non-main branch and did not yet submit a pull request, though I'm actually not that sure. In any case: keep an eye out, and possibly submit a pull request so that it shows up.
The other thing to point out is that just submitting a pull request, because of that pull_request: section above being in the workflow, triggers the workflow. I wasn't patient enough and left the page before GH could initiate the workflow and show me that it was running. Had I waited just a couple seconds after submitting the pull request, I would have seen this (as I learned subsequently on another). So I didn't even really need to set up the manual running of the workflow - just making a commit and pull request would have triggered it, without needing to commit on main or make a more substantial commit to the actual code of the project. I definitely should have realized this, as I've seen it when I've submitted pull requests to other projects, not to mention that it's specified right there in the workflow configuration. But hey, you sometimes you have to give yourself extra unnecessary busywork in order to realize something in a new context. And plus now I at least know how to set up a workflow so it can be run manually.
Finally, to the whole point of what I was doing. Setting up the additional OS environments was pretty simple. From:
# again, just a portion of the file
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
strategy:
matrix:
python-version: [3.7, 3.8]
to:
runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }}
strategy:
matrix:
os: [ubuntu-latest, macos-latest, windows-latest]
python-version: [3.7, 3.8, 3.9] # also added 3.9 here