actions

This is a collection of actions that are used by Outreach.

Contributing

Please read the CONTRIBUTING.md document for guidelines on developing and contributing changes.

High-level Overview

This repository houses importable GitHub Actions that can be used in other repositories. These actions are written in Go and executed via a Dockerfile within the workflow itself.

Creating a new Action

Boilerplate code can be generated for a new action by running the following command:

make new-action name=<name_of_action>

The name of the action cannot contain uppercase letters or spaces. Running the command does a few things:

• Adds an entry to the actions list in actions.yaml.
• Creates a reusable (from other repositories) workflow file in .github/workflows/
• Creates a test workflow file in test/
• Creates a directory to define the action with boilerplate go code in actions/

Testing an Action

You can test your action using the act CLI (nektos/act) with the following command:

make test-action name=<name_of_action>

Optionally you can explicitly provide a payload too:

make test-action name=<name_of_action> payload=<payload_name>

The payloads are found in test/payloads and if you explicitly provide one you should only provide the basename of the payload file without the extension (test/payloads/pull_request.json would be referred to by pull_request). If you do not explicitly provide a payload it will automatically try to use the a payload by looking at the value of the on key in the action's YAML file found in test/.

If you have an action with a complex on key (multiple triggers or triggers with filters) then you'll have to pass payload explicitly as the script will not be able to automatically parse it.

Using Actions in Other Repositories

To use actions created in this repository in other repositories you can follow this "Shared Workflows" pattern for various types of event triggers (on: ...):

name: Pull Request Shared Actions
on: pull_request

jobs:
  conventional_commit:
    name: Conventional Commit
    uses: getoutreach/actions/.github/workflows/conventional_commit.yaml@main
    secrets:
      OUTREACH_DOCKER_JSON: ${{ secrets.OUTREACH_DOCKER_JSON }}

This file would be placed in .github/workflows/pull-request-shared-actions.yaml. To add more shared workflows triggered by pull requests to this file, you'd just add a new key under jobs that looks similar to the one already there, changing the key, name, and uses path accordingly.

Configuring an Action to Make Org-Wide GitHub API Requests

By default, all actions can make GitHub API requests that are local to the repository that it is running in. If an action needs the ability to make org-wide GitHub API requests you'll need to add a key-value pair to the jobs[].<job-id>.secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN key: PAT_OUTREACH_CI: ${{ secrets.PAT_OUTREACH_CI }}. As well as set the orgWideAccess flag in the parameters of gh.NewClient to true in the Go code that defines the action.