tinkerbell/tink

Difficulties debugging GitHub actions that use nix-shell

micahhausler opened this issue · 2 comments

micahhausler commented

Expected Behaviour

When contributing to Tinkerbell, it should be easy to debug and fix failing CI tests for PRs.

Current Behaviour

The ci-checks.sh script uses nix-shell, which is not a standard shell in most Linux distributions. For developers using macOS or common Linux distributions, it is not clear how to debug CI failures. When you try to run the ci-checks.sh script without nix-shell installed, you'll get the following output

$ ./ci-checks.sh 
/usr/bin/env: ‘nix-shell’: No such file or directory

Possible Solution

I think we have at least two options:

  • Switch from nix-shell to more standard toling
  • Provide documentation on how to debug failing nixos tests. I ran the following to produce the
docker run -it --rm \
  -v `pwd`:/go/src/github.com/tinkerbell/tink \
  -w /go/src/github.com/tinkerbell/tink \
  nixos/nix nix-shell ci-checks.sh

Your Environment

  • Operating System and version (e.g. Linux, Windows, MacOS): I'm developing on macOS and also on Linux (Ubuntu 20.04).
mmlb commented

Thanks @micahhausler , should this go under https://github.com/tinkerbell/tink/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md#nix ( something along the lines of "or you can try it with docker" ) or specifically in its own section for CI?

jacobweinstock commented

Providing documentation would definitely be the quicker route. Documentation around this might be something we want regardless.