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A Rails and PostgreSQL setup for GitHub actions (CI)

Vincent Voyer on January 10, 2020

Since the release of GitHub actions I always wanted to setup a continuous integration using GitHub actions as described in their documentation. Wh...

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Tom Scott • Jan 17 '20

no support for docker-compose

Docker Compose is definitely installed on GitHub actions, not sure what you mean by "no support".

Here's the Workflow that uses make tasks to run the docker-compose commands: github.com/weathermen/soundstorm/b...

And the Makefile, which runs them: github.com/weathermen/soundstorm/b...

Vincent Voyer • Jan 21 '20

Thanks for that! I just removed that part. I tried to use it though and ran into issues mostly because my setup is not fully docker-compose based. I use docker-compose only for services, my Rails code runs in the ubuntu container from GitHub.

So the issue I get is this one:

initialize': Permission denied @ dir_initialize - /home/runner/work/project/project/postgres-data (Errno::EACCES)

My docker-compose.yml:

version: "3.7"
services:
  db:
    image: postgres:11.6-alpine
    ports:
      - "54320:5432"
    environment:
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: turnshift
    volumes:
      - ./postgres-data:/var/lib/postgresql/data

The volume is mounted with a user/permission that is different from the one used when I run the rails test command. I tried to work around that without luck, if you have any idea let me know. From what I can tell I think your whole infra runs in a docker container while me I always run Ruby/Rails locally and only use compose for services (good or bad that's how I do it for now).

Thanks again!

Sarah Abd • Jan 10 '20

Hi, I've found tricky solution for the manual trigger and also others completed my answer on stack overflow: stackoverflow.com/questions/589331...

Vincent Voyer • Jan 13 '20 • Edited

Oh wow that's very clever, and I read also the comment on SO from someone saying you could also limit that to the repository owner.

Do you know what it would take to update my current gist to allow for the repository owner, when they star the repo, to trigger a build?

Right now I have:

name: Test

on: [push]

jobs:

what do I need to change? I am new to the syntax :D

Sarah Abd • Jan 14 '20 • Edited

Alright, you can try this :

name: Test

on:
  watch
    types: [started]

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    if: github.actor == github.event.repository.owner.login

    steps:
       - name: Checkout repository
         uses: actions/checkout@v2
        #  add more ...

Notice you may have to reindent but I hope it would be fine :)

Vincent Voyer • Jan 17 '20

Thanks, I guess the last step is on how to combine what you propose with an already in place workflow that gets executed at push time.

For now I have:

name: Test

on: [push]

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
[...]

But if I change that to what you propose then my workflow is no more executed at push time.

Do you know if we can combine both manual trigger trick + usual push testing in a single or a combination of workflows maybe? Let me know!

Sarah Abd • Jan 17 '20

Yes, I set just the beginning but you can adapt it for an existing workflow or a new one.

can combine both manual trigger trick + usual push testing in a single or a combination of workflows

Yes you can !
For your example it will be like that :

on:
  push:
  watch:
    types: [started]

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    if: github.actor == github.event.repository.owner.login

    steps:
[...]

I din't try out yet this but I've already tried to setup a workflow with push event and cron, so it should be fine !

Mohamed ABDELLANI • Jan 10 '20 • Edited

Hi,

I was working on a very similar article (Actually, I'm not sure that I'll publish it now XD).

In my workflow, I set up two tests. The first one uses Rubocop to do static analysis of the code, and the second one uses RSpec and then generate a report using SimpleCov.
You can check my yaml file here

I also noticed another issue when I was trying to use environment variable to specify the version of the operating system that will be used for the tests.

Great job, thanks for sharing.

Vincent Voyer • Jan 10 '20

Hey there, thanks for the comment. Indeed I haven't yet setup multiple steps with dependencies in my setup. I might have to and your example will be very useful, thanks!

NDREAN • Aug 15 '20

Nice posts!. Don't you have in your bag a tuto on how to setup correctly a dockerized React + Rails API using Sidekiq/Redis? As a newbie, developing an app is not so difficult, but deploying it, env variables, the database config.. all these kind of things is a real nightmare.