Hi,
As my first post in this community, I decided to share my experience when I was testing Github's actions. I hope that you'll find it useful.
Objectif
My goal was to define a workflow composed of three steps for testing a rails application. These steps are:
- Using Rubocup, the code will be statically analyzed against the Ruby style guide.
- If the code passes the previous step, the RSpec tests are triggered to check if the new committed code didn't break anything somewhere else.
- Finally, if all tests pass, you will get a report generated using SimpleCov to see how well the tests covered the application's code
The demo application
You can find the code that I used for the demo in this github repository. The application is a pretty simple, one "Post" model with two attributed "title" and "content". Postgres is the database to store the data.
if you check config/database.yml, you'll find that I have solely edited the section related to the testing database as I didn't need to run the application in the development environment.
#config/database.yml
test:
<<: *default
host: localhost
username: postgres
database: rails-github-action_test
Setting up the workflow
Create .github/workflows
The first step is to create a folder called .github/workflows in the root of your project folder.
Create the file that will describe the workflow
In this file, you write all the details need to run the workflow. The extension must .yml or .yaml.
Define the environment variables
This section is not required but it makes the reconfiguration of the workflow for other contexts easier. This section should start with the keyword env.
env:
RUBY_VERSION: 2.4
POSTGRES_USER: postgres
POSTGRES_PASSWORD: ""
POSTGRES_DB: postgres
-
RUBY_VERSIONwill used to specify which version of ruby to use in the environment. -
POSTGRES_USER,POSTGRES_PASSWORDandPOSTGRES_DBare the database related information.
Define the name of the workflow and when it should be triggered
name: Rails tests
on: [push,pull_request]
jobs:
job1:
...
job2:
...
-
nameis the name of the workflow that will appear in the Github Actions UI.
-
onspecify what are the events that will trigger the workflow. In this example, it'll be triggered onpushandpull_requestevents. -
jobswill contain all thetasksto be defined in the workflow.
Describe jobs
Rubocop test
jobs:
rubocop-test:
name: Rubocop
runs-on: ubuntu-18.04
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v1
- uses: actions/setup-ruby@v1
with:
ruby-version: ${{ env.RUBY_VERSION }}
- name: Install Rubocop
run: gem install rubocop
- name: Check code
run: rubocop
-
nameis the name of the task. -
runs-onspecifies which operating system will be used to run the task. In addition toubuntu-18.04, you can usemacOSandWindows Server 2019. For more details, you can check this link. - In the section
steps, we'll define the instructions that will run in the operating system in order to prepare it, and make it run the tests. In this example :- We call the action actions/checkout@v1 which necessary to check out the repository.
- We call the action actions/setup-ruby@v1 to install ruby,
- We use
runto run the command to install rubocopgem install rubocop, - And finally, we run the test using
rubocop. you can learn more about actions here.
If the code passes the test, you'll get something like this :
RSpec tests
For the RSpect test, We use a very similar code. The first difference is that we used needs to precise that the task should run only after the task rubocop-test is finished and passed successfully.
job:
...
rspec-test:
name: RSpec
needs: rubocop-test
runs-on: ubuntu-18.04
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v1
- uses: actions/setup-ruby@v1
with:
ruby-version: ${{ env.RUBY_VERSION }}
- name: Install postgres client
run: sudo apt-get install libpq-dev
- name: Install dependencies
run: |
gem install bundler
bundler install
- name: Create database
run: |
bundler exec rails db:create RAILS_ENV=test
bundler exec rails db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test
- name: Run tests
run: bundler exec rake
- As
libpq-devis a required package to allow the rails application to communicate withPostgres. We added a step to install it usingapt-get install libpq-dev. - To create the database and the tables, we defined the step
Create database - To run the test, we used the command
bundler exec rake
At this level, if we run the tests they'll fail. The reason is that we didn't create database service yet. We need to define a new section services inside the rspec-test job.
services:
postgres:
image: postgres:latest
ports:
- 5432:5432
-
imageis the docker image name. -
portmaps the local ports to the container's ports.
rspec-test:
name: RSpec
needs: rubocop-test
runs-on: ubuntu-18.04
services:
postgres:
image: postgres:latest
ports:
- 5432:5432
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v1
...
SampleCov report
Now, we add the following step in order to upload the SimpleCov report from the testing environment and make it available to developers.
- name: Upload coverage results
uses: actions/upload-artifact@master
if: always()
with:
name: coverage-report
path: coverage
- we are using the action actions/upload-artifact@master to upload the report.
-
pathis the path of the folder/file to upload -
nameis the name of the downloadable file.
If your code passes the tests, you'll be able to download the report from the link in the upper-right corner.
You can check the full code in this link.
Top comments (2)
Hey, nice tutorial. Very good intro to GH actions. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for this!