Right now GitHub Actions is in Beta, but it’s due to come out of beta soon! This tutorial will run you through how you can configure GitHub Actions (using the new YAML based interface) to build and test your javascript app, from simple apps to complicated ones. Lots and lots of examples to get you going.

Since GitHub Actions is in beta, to get any of these examples to work you’ll need to apply for the beta program.

A Simple CI Action

To enable actions, all you need to do is create a folder in your project called .github/workflows (notice the leading “.” on “.github”) and put a YAML file inside. For example, the file below is .github/workflows/build.yaml .

This is a simple workflow which will build and test your node.js app:

name : Build on : [ push , pull_request ] jobs : test : runs-on : ubuntu-latest steps : - uses : actions/checkout@v1 - name : Use Node.js uses : actions/setup-node@v1 with : node-version : ' 10' - name : test run : | npm install npm test

Let’s walk through this step by step. First we have an on: [push, pull_request] , which defines what events cause this workflow to run. There are a lot of events you can use to trigger a workflow - here we’re tirggering on pushes and on (some) pull_request events. But you can run a workflow when a PR is commented on, when a label is added to an issue, when a new issue is opened - there’s really no limit. See the https://help.github.com/en/articles/events-that-trigger-workflows for a list of all events.

I say “some” pull_request events, because by default pull_request triggers on PRs being opened, reopened, or synchronized. You can get this to trigger on other events too, like when someone comments on a PR or when a PR is closed, but these are less useful for a CI workflow.

Then we have a set of jobs - these jobs can run in parallel, or they can specify dependencies on each other. We just have one job, with a set of steps, which run one after another on the same machine, in squence.

The first step is the checkout action which checks out our code. Note that for pull_request events, actions/checkout will actually checkout the head of our PR and then automatically merge it against the base this PR is against (so if we open a PR against master, actions/checkout will checkout our branch, then merge it against master for us).

The second step sets up node-js at version 10. You actually don’t strictly need to use setup-node , as node is already installed on the ubuntu image we’re using, but this lets us pick the version of node.js we want. You can see a list of all the software that comes pre-installed.

Finally, the “test” step is the interesting one. It does npm install and then runs npm test . Depending on your project you might need an npm run build in there too (pro tip: you can put your build in a prepare script in package.json to make it run as part of npm install ).

That’s about as simple as this could get. Let’s make it a little more interesting…

Testing with Multiple Node.js Versions

name : Build on : [ push ] jobs : test : runs-on : ubuntu-latest strategy : matrix : node-version : [ ' 12' , ' 10' ] name : Node ${{ matrix.node }} sample steps : - uses : actions/checkout@v1 - name : Setup node uses : actions/setup-node@v1 with : node-version : ${{ matrix.node-version }} - run : npm install - run : npm test

First, we’ve added a “matrix strategy” to our build, to run our tests on multiple versions of node.js. Second, we split our “test” step up into two steps: “npm install” and “test”. I prefer to split these up into smaller steps, because when something fails in the “test” part, I don’t have to wade through logs from the “npm install” part.

Note that Actions is smart enough to skip the “test” step if the “npm install” step fails. Although, if we have a step we want to run in a failure case, we can make that happen.

Running an Action on Failure, and Handling Artifacts

name : Build on : [ push ] jobs : test : runs-on : ubuntu-latest steps : - uses : actions/checkout@v1 - run : npm install - run : npm test - name : Collect screenshot if : failure() run : | ./bin/makeScreenshot /tmp/screen.jpg - name : Upload logs uses : actions/upload-artifact@master if : failure() with : name : screen.jpg path : /tmp/screen.jpg

Notice we have two steps with if: failure() - these steps will only run if some previous steps have failed.

We’re also using the upload-artifact action here to upload our screen shot to GitHub as an artifact. When you view a run of this action in GitHub Actions, in the upper right corner there will be a dropdown that will let you view any artifacts created during the build. There’s also a download-artifact.

So far, all the examples we’ve had here run in a single “job”. If you have multiple jobs they will run on different VMs, so you may want to create an artifact in one job, and then download it in another so you have it available without rebuilding it. At present there is no way to delete artifacts from GitHub, so be careful about uploading anything sensitive!

Secrets - Using private NPM packages

Speaking of sensitive information, let’s say you’re using private NPM packages. When you want to install a package in your CI environment, you’ll need an NPM token with read permission to your packages.

As we all know, it’s a really bad idea to commit tokens and other secrets into a github repo. So we’re going to put our secrets somewhere more secure. In your repo, click on “Settings”, then pick “Secrets” on the left hand side. Click on “Add a new secret” and call it “NPM_TOKEN”, and enter an NPM token.

Now we can do:

name : Build on : [ push ] jobs : test : runs-on : ubuntu-latest steps : - uses : actions/checkout@v1 - name : Setup Node uses : actions/setup-node@v1 with : node-version : ' 10' registry-url : ' https://registry.npmjs.org' - name : Install Dependencies env : NODE_AUTH_TOKEN : ${{ secrets.NPM_TOKEN }} run : npm install --ignore-scripts - name : Run npm post-install scripts run : | npm rebuild --quiet npm run prepare --if-present - name : test run : npm test

We’re doing a couple of new things here. First of all, we’re setting a registry-url in the setup-node action. This might seem a little strange - why are we setting the registry URL to point to the default registry? The answer is that registry-url does something a little more than just set this URL. It actually writes a ~/.npmrc file which looks something like this:

//registry.npmjs.org/:_authToken=${NODE_AUTH_TOKEN}

This means when you run npm install , NPM will use the NODE_AUTH_TOKEN environment variable to authenticate with the registry. This technique is discussed in this blog post from NPM.

We set the NODE_AUTH_TOKEN environment variable using the “secrets” context:

env : NODE_AUTH_TOKEN : ${{ secrets.NPM_TOKEN }}

Any environment variable set in env will only be available in the environment for that specific step, which limits the exposure of our secrets. If a library we use has some malicious code in it that gets run during our npm test step and tries to steal our authentication token, the NODE_AUTH_TOKEN variable won’t be available for it to steal.

This is also why we split npm install up into npm install --ignore-scripts and npm rebuild - npm install --ignore-scripts will not let any post-install scripts run in any of our dependencies, which will stop malicious packages from stealing our credentials from the “well known” NODE_AUTH_TOKEN environment variable. Once everything is installed, we run npm rebuild to run all the post-install scripts when our credentials are no longer in the environment. (In this example, this is probably excessively paranoid - if a malicious script really wanted to steal your NPM credentials, they could just read your ~/.npmrc file when you npm install on your development machine, but it illustrates how you can compartmentalize secrets, and only expose them to the steps that need them.)

Running a Workflow Only on master

It’s easy to make it so a whole workflow will only run on a specific branch:

name : Build on : push : branches : - master

You can also run a workflow on any branch other than master:

name : Build on : push : branches : - ' *' - ' !master'

Running a Step Only on master

But sometimes you want to run your workflow on every branch, and there’s just a single step you want to run only on specific branches. Let’s say you’re using semantic-release to automate publishing new releases to NPM. You only want to run npm run semantic-relase on master, since this is the only place it needs to be run:

name : Build on : [ push ] jobs : test : runs-on : ubuntu-latest steps : - uses : actions/checkout@v1 - name : Setup Node uses : actions/setup-node@v1 with : node-version : ' 10' - run : npm install - run : npm test - name : semantic-release if : success() && github.ref == 'refs/heads/master' env : GH_TOKEN : ${{ secrets.DEPLOY_GH_TOKEN }} NPM_TOKEN : ${{ secrets.NPM_TOKEN }} run : npm run semantic-release

The interesting bit here is the if: success() && github.ref == 'refs/heads/master' . We’re getting github.ref from the “github context”. The contents of the github context are different, depending on what event triggered this action. There are a number of contexts available with a lot of information in them.

Also, if you already know a little about GitHub Actions, you might know there’s already a GITHUB_TOKEN available in the environment; we need to provide a DEPLOY_GH_TOKEN here though, because the default GITHUB_TOKEN doesn’t work for semantic-release, so we need a personal access token with all the required permissions.

Very similar to the above case, let’s stay you want to create a docker image and publish it, but you only want to do this for tags:

steps : - name : push to docker if : success() && startsWith(github.ref, 'refs/tags/') run : docker push ...

(Thanks to OrangutanGaming for this tip!)

Conditionally Running a Job

We saw how to run the whole workflow for certain branches/tags, and how to run a step for certain branches/tags - it would be very nice if there was a way to make it so individual jobs within a workflow run conditionally (only build a docker image and deploy if this is a tagged release, for example), but unfortunately there’s no easy way to do this. The best you can do right now is add an if: to every single step in the job. Note that GitHub will still launch a VM for a brief moment even though no steps are going to run.

Testing with a service

Let’s suppose you’re writing a library which interacts with RabbitMQ, and you need a real RabbitMQ instance running in order to check that your library works. The workflow file supports launching services in containers, using essentially the same syntax as docker-compose:

name : Build on : [ push ] jobs : test : runs-on : ubuntu-latest services : rabbitmq : image : rabbitmq ports : - 5672:5672 steps : - uses : actions/checkout@v1 - name : test run : | npm install npm test

This will download the latest rabbitmq docker image from Docker Hub, launch RabbitMQ, and expose port 5672 on localhost so your tests can get to it. If you don’t specify a host and container port, you can get the allocated port number from the conext (e.g. ${{ job.services.rabbitmq.ports['5672'] }} ).

Only run on a PR, and using external actions

Let’s suppose we have some slow selenium tests we want to run, but rather than run them on every single push, we’re only going to run them on master and on PRs.

If the event is a pull_request , it’s easy to get the current PR number from the context via ${{ github.event.number }} , but unfortunately this information is not readily available for a push event. We can go fetch this information from the GitHub API however, using the GITHUB_TOKEN which is automatically provided to us in the secrets context. To do this, we’re going to write a quick Github Action. I’ll post another article about how to build a custom action, but for now you can find the source for this on GitHub.

name : Build on : [ ' push' ] jobs : test : runs-on : ubuntu-latest steps : - uses : actions/checkout@v1 # Find the PR associated with this push, if there is one. - uses : jwalton/gh-find-current-pr@v1 id : findPr with : github-token : ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} - name : test run : | npm install npm test - name : slow tests if : success() && steps.findPr.outputs.pr run : npm test:slow

This workflow only runs on “push”, but we’ll use a custom action to figure out if this is a PR or not. We have a new step with a uses: jwalton/gh-find-current-pr@v1 , which tells GitHub to go download the action with the v1 tag. Note that this is not a module published in NPM, it’s available at https://github.com/jwalton/gh-find-current-pr.

This action needs some “inputs”, in this case a github-token to use to call into the GitHub API. (Why don’t we have to provide that to actions/checkout@v1 above? Because that’s a special “trusted action” provided by GitHub, so it can cheat and get that secret for itself.)

Finally, this action provides some “outputs”, in this case a “pr” which is a string containing the PR number, or an empty string if there is no PR. We give the step an id: findPr to make it easy to refer to the step later on.

We use these the output via the steps context in the “slow tests” step: if: success() && steps.findPr.outputs.pr . If pr is set, we’ll run the tests, and if it’s an empty string we’ll skip them.

If you’re looking for actions to help you out, note that actions are published in GitHub Marketplace.

Running Things in Parallel

So far all the examples we’ve done have run everything in a single job. We can, however, split a task up into multiple jobs to speed things up. The one caveat to this is that everything runs in its own VM, so any setup you need to do, you need to do in each job.

For example, you can create a job which just runs eslint (and there’s even an action in the marketplace that will help you do this), but you’ll have to run the checkout action and npm install in that job before you can run eslint . If your npm install takes 2 minues, and your eslint run only takes a few seconds, then you’re better off just running eslint in the main job. (Although there are some clever ways around this, like only installing the specific modules you need to run eslint .)

The actions team also plans to implement caching at some point in the future, which may allow us to substantially improve the speed of npm install . Depending on the specifics of your project, you may find npm ci gives you better performance than npm install .

name : Build on : [ push ] jobs : test : name : 🧪 Unit Test runs-on : ubuntu-latest steps : - uses : actions/checkout@v1 - run : npm install - run : npm test lint : name : ✅ Lint runs-on : ubuntu-latest steps : - uses : actions/checkout@v1 - run : npm install - run : npm run lint build : name : 🛠 Build runs-on : ubuntu-latest # This job will only run if both `test` and `lint` jobs run successfully. needs : [ test , lint ] steps : - uses : actions/checkout@v1 - run : npm install - run : npm run build # Publish to NPM if everything went well - run : npm run semantic-release

Notice the needs: line in the build step, which prevents build from running until both test and lint are finished and successful.

Adding a README.md Badge

Ok, here’s the part you came here for. :)

To do this, you need to know your workflow name. For example, if your workflow starts with:

name : My Build

Add the following to your README.md:

![ Build Status ]( https://github.com/your-owner/your-repo/workflows/My%20Build/badge.svg )

Replace the your-owner , your-repo , and My%20Build as appropriate.

Wrapping Up

Hopefully that gives a taste of the power of GitHub Actions. There’s a lot we didn’t cover, so be sure to check out the official docs, but hopefully this was enough to whet your appetite and get you building some cool stuff!

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