exploring github actions

github-actions-workflows.md

My "fetch info" workflow took around 3minutes 26 seconds to complete this morning. It installs nix, gets a shell with cargo and rustc, and then executes cargo run.

I created another workflow to download rustup, run cargo build --release, and to output an artifact:

- name: build netplay-bracket-finder
  run: |
    cd rust && cargo build --release
- name: upload artifact
  uses: actions/upload-artifact@3cea5372237819ed00197afe530f5a7ea3e805c8 # v3
  with:
    name: netplay-bracket-finder-x86_64-linux
    path: rust/target/release/netplay-bracket-finder

I modified my fetch workflow to use the gh CLI to grab the latest released binary when fetching info:

- name: fetch info from api
  run: |
    # download latest binary from release
    gh release download --pattern 'netplay-bracket-finder'
    chmod +x ./netplay-bracket-finder
    stat ./netplay-bracket-finder
    # fetch info from API
    ./netplay-bracket-finder | tee docs/events.json
  env:
    GRAPHQL_API_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GRAPHQL_API_TOKEN }}
    GH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

And finally I made a release workflow that downloads the artifact from a successful build, creates a tag, and then creates a release using the gh CLI:

on:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      tag:
        description: 'tag for release'
        required: true
        type: string
      id:
        description: 'id of build'
        required: true
        type: string

# find commit of workflow build
SHA="$(gh run view ${{ inputs.id }} --json headSha -q '.headSha')"
if [[ -z $SHA ]]; then exit 1; fi
# download artifact from workflow build
gh run download "${{ inputs.id }}" -p 'netplay-bracket-finder-x86_64-linux'
# create and push tag for commit
git tag "${{ inputs.tag }}" "${SHA}" && git push --tags
# create release with tag + artifact
gh release create "${{ inputs.tag }}" \
  './netplay-bracket-finder-x86_64-linux/netplay-bracket-finder#x86_64-linux'

Now I can create releases from successful CI builds easily, and my "fetch info" workflow takes only 13 seconds! gh run list is very cool.

I ran into issues halfway through - the rust binaries I built with nix did not run after I downloaded the artifacts! They were dynamically linked to object files in /nix/store, and the new agents didn't have /nix/store. I tried build a statically linked rust binary with nix for a while, but I had issues linking, and didn't want to keep exploring.