bayeslife/githubactions

Test out github actions

Hello World GitHub Actions CI CD

This is a repository to investigate and demonstrate using github actions.

Goal of this repository:

• code is pushed to GitHub
• the code is built and tested
• an artefact is built and released as a Git Hub release

References

• Git Hub Actions
• Git Hub Workflow
• Git Hub Expression

Learnings

• Every yaml file in the .github/workflows is a separate workflow. There can be many workflows that trigger on differnt conditions.

• Use the environment variable GITHUB_RUN_NUMBER to get a build number. There are a number of default environment variables available.

• Setting variables that are visible through the workflow was not obvious. Using env section at the job level variables were available to all steps

    env: 
      PKG_NAME: helloworld-0.1.0.${{ github.run_number }}.tgz

• Accessing variables occurs via expressions which either were

      run: echo $GITHUB_RUN_NUMBER $PKG_NAME
or
       run: tar czf ${{env.PKG_NAME}} src node_modules package.json

• Had issues where I created a release but wasnt able to push any further changes to repo. This appears to be been that I copied code which used the branch name as the tag. I deleted the release and change the artifact tag to be the PKG_NAME

• Not yet sure I understand the difference between these 2 expression statement : $() vs ${{ }}