My experience with Github Actions

I started using Github Actions a couple months ago. While I’m not a power user of Github Actions, I still find it to be powerful.

What is Github Actions?

Github Actions is a service that allows you to run code when certain events happen. For example, you can run code when a pull request is opened, when a commit is pushed, or when a release is published.It allows for continuous integration and continuous deployment, but also management of pull requests, issues, and more.

My use cases

I’ve been using Github Actions to automatically deploy my website. I use Hugo to generate my website, and I use Github Pages to host it. I also use it to automatically build and release my Go programs.

Continuous deployment

Before I started learning Go, I used Python. When I started using Go, I liked being able to compile my code. I learned of cross compilation, and started using xgo to cross compile my code. However, at that time, I was running xgo locally and manually uploading the binaries to Github and publishing the release. After publishing two releases with this strategy, I decided to automate the process. I decided to start using Github Actions. I discovered an xgo step which I could use in my workflow. I found an action for nightly releases, but unfortunately realized that is was intended to update the files associated with a release, not re-release with the updated files.
After some research I found softprops/action-gh-release worked for my use case. However, at that time, a new tag was created with the short commit tag for every new release. I kept using this for a while, before eventually realizing how many tags and releases were being created. I started trying to find a way to delete the old release and tag before creating a new one. I found EndBug/latest-tag which let me create a rolling tag.

Example workflow:

The example workflow below is a slightly modified version of the workflow I use to build and release cross-blogger as of June 2024.

name: Continuous Integration

on:
  push:
  workflow_dispatch:
    inputs:
      branch:
        description: 'Branch to build and release from'
        required: false
        default: 'main'

concurrency:
  group: ci-${{ github.ref }}
  cancel-in-progress: true


jobs:

  build-and-release:
    # Unless the branch is specified, only run on the default branch
    if: github.event_name == 'workflow_dispatch' || github.ref == 'refs/heads/${{ github.event.inputs.branch || github.ref }}'
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3
    - name: Cross compile
      uses: crazy-max/ghaction-xgo@v3
      with:
        xgo_version: latest
        go_version: 1.22
        dest: /home/runner/work/cross-blogger/builds
        prefix: cross-blogger
    - name: Compress releases
      run: zip -r /home/runner/work/cross-blogger/binaries.zip /home/runner/work/cross-blogger/builds/*
    - name: Update tag
      uses: EndBug/latest-tag@latest
      with:
        ref: rolling
    - name: Release
      uses: softprops/action-gh-release@v2
      with:
        name: Rolling release
        prerelease: true
        tag_name: rolling
        body: "Latest commit: ${{ github.event.head_commit.message }}"
        files: |
          /home/runner/work/cross-blogger/binaries.zip 
          /home/runner/work/cross-blogger/builds/*          
    - name: Upload Artifact
      uses: actions/upload-artifact@v3
      with:
        name: binaries
        path: /home/runner/work/cross-blogger/builds/*