workflow.md

Seperate your workflow

When you have larger or more complex projects, you’ll want separate jobs to do separate things in paralell.

Up until now, we have had a job called Build both for the build and test, but that is not necessarily descriptive.

We define each job as a collection of jobs key:

jobs:
  my_first_job:
    name: My first job
  my_second_job:
    name: My second job

By default all jobs are run in parallel. To control the order of jobs execution, we can add the needskey. A job can declare that it needs one or more (a list) of jobs to finish successfully before it is triggered.

To run the two jobs sequentially we define a workflow where job-2 "requires" job-1 to have run before it starts.

name: workflow
jobs:
  job-1:
  job-2:
    needs: job-1

This also ensures that job-2 is not run if job-1 fails. It is possible to add a name to the workflow e.g. here: name: workflow.

To ensure that all files from previous jobs are available at new one, we have to make sure to upload artifact at the end of the job and download it at the beginning of a new one. The way to do it can be found in previous exercise 04-storing-artifacts.md.

Tasks

Let's try to clean up our current build by utilizing workflows:

• Name your workflow Java CI.

name: JAVA CI

---

• Divide your job into two jobs: Clone-down and Build. Clone-down will checkout the repository, Build will build the code, run the tests, and stores the results.

jobs: 
  Clone-down:
    ...
  Build:
    ...

---

• Build should be dependent on Clone-down job. Each of them also needs a running instance and container.

Clone-down:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    container: gradle:6-jdk11
    steps:
      - ...

---

• Remember that to have information from previous job(s) the artifact with this information needs to be downloaded and respectively uploaded by using (actions/upload-artifact@v3and actions/download-artifact@v3).

Solution

If you strugle and need to see the whole Solution you can extend the section below.

Solution

name: Java CI
on: push
jobs:
  Clone-down:
    name: Clone down repo
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    container: gradle:6-jdk11
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3
    - name: Upload Repo
      uses: actions/upload-artifact@v3
      with:
        name: code
        path: .
  Build:
      runs-on: ubuntu-latest
      needs: Clone-down
      container: gradle:6-jdk11
      steps:
      - name: Download code
        uses: actions/download-artifact@v3
        with:
          name: code
          path: .
      - name: Build with Gradle
        run: chmod +x ci/build-app.sh && ci/build-app.sh
      - name: Test with Gradle
        run: chmod +x ci/unit-test-app.sh && ci/unit-test-app.sh
      - name: Upload Repo
        uses: actions/upload-artifact@v3
        with:
          name: code
          path: .

Results

Opening it should show something like:

More information about this topic can be found here: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/reference/workflow-syntax-for-github-actions

Resources

https://github.com/marketplace/actions/upload-a-build-artifact https://github.com/marketplace/actions/download-a-build-artifact