Set up Please action

GitHub action to set up Please for building projects.

Features

• Automatically set build.path based on the PATH environment variable
• Automatically set profile (when configured)
• Automatically set plain output mode
• Set include and exclude labels
• Detect and download the right Please version
• Download pleasew and expose it as plz executable in PATH
• Automatically save logs at the end of the job

Why not just ./pleasew?

Please comes with an install script in every project by default when you first initialize them with plz init. pleasew is able to download Please to a common location (if it's not already installed) which makes Please portable and comfortable to use.

Unfortunately, it doesn't take platform and profile specific config which is quite understandable, because parsing the config file format from plain Shell is hard, but at the same time using profiles is extremely handy, especially when getting started with Please.

This action is written in TypeScript which is better suited for parsing files, adding support for platform and profile specific configuration when deciding the correct Please version to install.

The action can also work better with self-hosted runners: it utilizes tool cache to save downloaded binaries into cache, so the runner doesn't have to download it on each run.

Ultimately, the action provides better integration with GitHub Actions and can save you from some duplications.

Usage

Add the following after your checkout step:

- name: Set up Please
  uses: sagikazarmark/setup-please-action@v0

Then in your build steps:

- name: Build
  run: plz build ./...

Note: Please needs explicit targets (./...) when running on GitHub Actions. See thought-machine/please#1174 for details.

If (for some reason) you need to use please directly or your pleasew script that doesn't support PLZ_ARGS, make sure to pass the $PLZ_ARGS environment variable to the command to utilize all features of this action:

- name: Build
  run: ./pleasew $PLZ_ARGS build ./...

Inputs

Following inputs can be used as step.with keys

* Required fields

List type can be a comma or newline-delimited string

include: kind, minikube

tags: |
  kind
  minikube

Debugging build process

Please produces a large amount of logs that can help debugging builds. There are two approaches for accessing those logs using this action. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. You might not need them at all (they are turned off by default). Choose the one that makes the most sense for you or enable them on demand when you need them.

Output logs to stderr

This action provides two inputs to control what Please outputs to the stderr:

• output
• verbosity

(Check the table above for details)

The following example makes Please output everything it has to the stderr:

- name: Set up Please
  uses: sagikazarmark/setup-please-action@v0
  with:
    output: all
    verbosity: debug

By dumping everything to the stderr, you can easily browse, search or even download logs from the GitHub Actions UI.

Most of the time you probably don't need this level of verbosity though, and it makes finding failed targets and the reason they failed harder.

Save logs as artifacts

Another option for examining Please logs is saving them as artifacts.

You can easily do that with a few lines of YAML:

- name: Save Please log output
  uses: actions/upload-artifact@v1
  with:
    name: build-log
    path: plz-out/log

This action can save you those lines by simply enabling the save-logs option:

- name: Set up Please
  uses: sagikazarmark/setup-please-action@v0
  with:
    save-logs: true
  env:
    # See https://github.com/sagikazarmark/setup-please-action/issues/6
    MATRIX_CONTEXT: ${{ toJson(matrix) }}

Note: for the time being enabling save-logs is not enough, you also need to pass the matrix as an environment variable if you utilize the build matrix feature. See #6 for more details.

The logs will be available for each job in your workflow as a separate build artifact called JOBNAME-log.

License

The MIT License (MIT). Please see License File for more information.