DEV Community

Michael Heap
Michael Heap

Posted on • Originally published at michaelheap.com on

1 1

Add and Commit action

Add and Commit is the second (of three!) actions that can be used to push your changes to a repo during a GitHub Actions workflow.

What does it do?

Much like the last spotlight post, today’s action is focused on adding and committing files to a repo. The README does a good job explaining how it’s different to git-auto-commit-action:

This is heavily inspired by git-auto-commit-action (by Stefan Zweifel): that action automatically detects changed files and commits them. While this is useful for most situations, this doesn’t commit untracked files and can sometimes commit unintended changes (such as package-lock.json or similar, that may have happened during previous steps).

It’s also evolved from git-auto-commit and supports pulling changes if required before a push, removing files with git rm and makes features such as signoff an input rather than making you specify --signoff as a commit_option

How does it work?

add-and-commit is implemented in TypeScript rather than bash and is a single 388 line file named main.ts. It uses simple-git to interact with the underlying git repo and provides a compiled version of the action that includes all dependencies.

main.ts itself is reasonable easy to follow:

There are a couple of other interesting things in the action to dig into.

One of the big questions in the Actions world is how to parse structured input. add-and-commit attempts to parse inputs that can be arrays as both JSON and YAML before falling back to treating it as a simple string.

The action also handles setting defaults in the code rather than using the default field in action.yml like git-auto-commit-action does.

Common use cases

Automatically committing changed files can be useful in a couple of situations. The example shown in the docs is to run eslint --fix to fix code styling before pushing the changes back to the repo:

name: Lint source code
on: push

jobs:
  run:
    name: Lint with ESLint
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Set up Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 12.x

      - name: Install dependencies
        run: npm install

      - name: Update source code
        run: eslint "src/**" --fix

      - name: Commit changes
        uses: EndBug/add-and-commit@v7
        with:
          author_name: Your Name
          author_email: mail@example.com
          message: "Your commit message"
          add: "*.js"
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Another idea is to make sure that your lib folder for your action (like the one used in add-and-commit) is always compiled as expected on push:

name: Automatic Compile
on: push

jobs:
  run:
    name: Compile
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Set up Node.js
        uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 12.x

      - name: Install dependencies
        run: npm install

      - name: Compile
        run: npx ncc -o lib

      - name: Commit changes
        uses: EndBug/add-and-commit@v7
        with:
          author_name: Your Name
          author_email: mail@example.com
          message: "Your commit message"
          add: "lib"
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Useful links

Image of Datadog

How to Diagram Your Cloud Architecture

Cloud architecture diagrams provide critical visibility into the resources in your environment and how they’re connected. In our latest eBook, AWS Solution Architects Jason Mimick and James Wenzel walk through best practices on how to build effective and professional diagrams.

Download the Free eBook

Top comments (0)

A Workflow Copilot. Tailored to You.

Pieces.app image

Our desktop app, with its intelligent copilot, streamlines coding by generating snippets, extracting code from screenshots, and accelerating problem-solving.

Read the docs