Discussion on: Run your Github Actions jobs from a specific directory

[Lukas Klingsbo]

This doesn't work for uses unfortunately.

[Alekz]

uses is for linking a repo, which works in its own directories, that is what is supposed to happen, that's why you cant use working-directory with uses

[Cor le Roux]

For anyone struggling with the Node Setup action step, specifically with the uses section when your project is in a sub-folder, you need to add a cache-dependency-path to the with section.

Example:

 - uses: actions/setup-node@v2
  with:
    node-version: '14'
    cache: 'npm'
    cache-dependency-path: subdir/package-lock.json`

[rickychongjl]

To add to this, if your package.lock.json is in another directory, this would most probably mean that you need to target npm build command to that particular directory by adding the default-directory syntax on your steps or job (depending on your setup)

npm:
runs-on: windows-latest
defaults:
run:
working-directory: ./subdir/
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- uses: actions/setup-node@v3
with:
node-version: 16
cache: 'npm'
cache-dependency-path: ./subdir/package-lock.json