Notify when there was no commited changes

[piranna]

At

git-auto-commit-action/entrypoint.sh

Line 20 in c887fa4

echo "Working tree clean. Nothing to commit."

, if there's no content to commit, the action exit sucessfully, but there's no way to know if there were commited changes or repo is untouched. I need to know this to prevent to publish a package to npm with nightly changes if there has been no changes. Ideally Github Actions should provide a neutral output as it did in legacy version, but it got removed. Maybe one alternative would be to set an environment variable to notify this.

[stefanzweifel]

I think there are a couple of things we could do here:

• Add a new input option which will indicate that the Action should fail if no changes were committed (through the exit code).
• Push a value to the Actions output. Your workflow could then interact with the value and stop the publishing process.

I personally like both approaches.

[piranna]

I was thinking about both ideas, and I like both of them, too. Problem with the exit code is that you would not be able to diferenciate when it failed or it was a neutral exit, probably would be the less bad of the cases.

What do you mean about "push a value to the Actions output"? Some trick like Azure one to set environment variables between steps, where they are echoed to stdout with a special prefix? Do you have documentation about that?

[stefanzweifel]

What do you mean about "push a value to the Actions output"?

I thought about adding this: https://help.github.com/en/actions/building-actions/metadata-syntax-for-github-actions#outputs

We could do something like this

echo \"::set-output name=changed_detected::true\"
echo \"::set-output name=changed_detected::false\"

You would then have access to the value in your workflow file through steps.<step_id>.outputs.tag.

---

As an example, this repository has a workflow, which automatically creates a new release, when a tag is pushed.
The workflow uses the output of one Action or step in another step.

git-auto-commit-action/.github/workflows/continuous-deployment.yml

Lines 16 to 29 in c887fa4

	steps:
	- name: "Determine tag"
	id: "determine-tag"
	run: "echo \"::set-output name=tag::${GITHUB_REF#refs/tags/}\""
	- name: "Create release"
	uses: "actions/[email protected]"
	env:
	GITHUB_TOKEN: "${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}"
	with:
	draft: false
	prerelease: false
	release_name: "${{ steps.determine-tag.outputs.tag }}"
	tag_name: "${{ steps.determine-tag.outputs.tag }}"

[piranna]

What do you mean about "push a value to the Actions output"?

I thought about adding this: help.github.com/en/actions/building-actions/metadata-syntax-for-github-actions#outputs

We could do something like this

echo \"::set-output name=changed_detected::true\"
echo \"::set-output name=changed_detected::false\"

You would then have access to the value in your workflow file through steps.<step_id>.outputs.tag.

It's almost equal to how Azure does it :-) This fine for me :-)

[stefanzweifel]

@piranna Just a head up: I've prepared something in #49 and merged it into master. I'm probably gonna release a proper version in the upcoming days, as I would like to add #47 to 4.1.0as well.

You will then be able to use the output like this:
https://github.com/stefanzweifel/git-auto-commit-action/blob/956a47433ba7e7968b6b72ee72f9e4ca4e8ca2a2/.github/workflows/git-auto-commit.yml

Will close this issue when I've tagged a new version.

[piranna]

I'm probably gonna release a proper version in the upcoming days, as I would like to add #47 to 4.1.0as well

Great, that would be useful to me too :-) I'm willing to use that feature at nightly pipelines of https://github.com/projectlint/OS-lifecycle :-)

[stefanzweifel]

Hello again,

I've just released v4.1.0 which has the changes made in #49 in it.

https://github.com/stefanzweifel/git-auto-commit-action/releases/tag/v4.1.0

Hope you can utilise this in your workflows.

[piranna]

Hope you can utilise this in your workflows.

Nice, now it's working :-)

https://github.com/projectlint/OS-lifecycle/runs/490127931?check_suite_focus=true

Thank you so much! :-D