How to create nightly releases with Github Actions

In my GitHub projects, I like to have the artifact (e.g. a jar) of the latest successful build on a specific branch (e.g. develop or main) available for download. This is the equivalent of a nightly release, but is not supported out-of-the-box by Github.

GitHub Actions lets you attach artifacts to builds, but those artifacts do not have a stable URL. Worse, the URL is difficult to find automatically (you need to navigate to the Actions tab of the repo, find the latest build, etc.).

My workaround is the following.

1) create a release (just once)

The idea here is just to have a release linked to some tag, that will be used later in the GitHub workflow.

In your repo, navigate to Releases and click on Draft a new release:

• on the Choose a tag dropdown, create a tag, for example nightly,
• (optional) fill in the title and description as you see fit,
• (optional) select This is a pre-release

The only important thing here is to have a tag. I usually use nightly, but the actual name is up to you.

The final, stable link will be:

https://github.com/${user}/${repo}/releases/tag/${tag}

2) Add a step in your workflow

Use the eine/tip action to update the release with whatever artifact(s) you want.

The parameters are:

• token: your GitHub token ⟶ ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }},
• tag: the name of the tag created in 1,
• rm: whether or not to remove existing artifacts on upload (I always set it to true),
• files: either a single filename/pattern or a multi-line string with one file per line

Here is a simple example, uploading anything under build/libs to the nightly release, removing/replacing old artifacts in the process:

- name: Update nightly release
  uses: eine/tip@master
  with:
    tag: nightly
    rm: true
    token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
    files: build/libs/*.*

Another nice feature is to have some version.txt or info.txt file in the release, that holds some metadata such as the version of the artifact, the GitHub ref, etc. For that, you can simply add a step before eine/tip:

- name: Create info file
  run: |
     echo -e "ref: $GITHUB_REF \ncommit: $GITHUB_SHA\nbuild: $(date +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ")" \
     > build/libs/info.txt

Examples

Here are some of my repos that use this trick:

• https://github.com/big-building-data/bbdata-api ⟶ workflow
• https://github.com/derlin/bitdowntoc ⟶ workflow
• https://github.com/derlin/docker-compose-viz-mermaid ⟶ workflow