GitHub Actions: Reusable Workflows

Overview

As a best practice in Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD), reusable workflows in GitHub Actions are a powerful feature that enhances code reuse, promotes best practices, boosts productivity, and improves maintainability and collaboration. This ultimately leads to more efficient and effective CI/CD processes.

Benefits of Reusable Workflows

• Reusable workflows facilitate the creation of modular workflows, reducing code duplication across multiple locations. This centralization simplifies maintenance and updates, as changes can be made in one place.
• By promoting best practices, reusable workflows allow teams to develop a library of well-designed, tested, and effective workflows, which can be utilized across different repositories.
• Enhances flexibility, maintainability, and productivity by enabling teams to build upon existing workflows rather than starting from scratch.

Testing Reusable Workflows

Problem Statement

While reusable workflows offer significant advantages, testing these workflows can be challenging, especially since they may be utilized across multiple repositories. A single change in a reusable workflow can impact various repositories if not thoroughly tested.

Solution

GitHub Actions provides two key features, workflow_dispatch and repository_dispatch, that allow users to trigger workflows either manually or from external systems.

• The workflow_dispatch event enables users to manually initiate a workflow through the GitHub API or UI, allowing for user-driven actions instead of automatic triggers.
• In contrast, the repository_dispatch event allows external systems to programmatically trigger workflows via API calls. Custom event types can be defined, enabling workflows to respond to specific events and providing granular control over their execution.

Implementation

Create a centralized workflow repository named gh-actions-wf, which contains multiple reusable workflows:

• get-branch-name.yml: Determines the branch name based on the event type (push, pull request, or repository dispatch).
• get-short-sha.yml: Retrieves the 7-digit short SHA to append to the Docker image.
• nodejs-build.yml: Builds a Node.js Docker image, taking service names, Git SHA, and branch name as inputs.
• ci-unittest.yml: Configured with workflow_dispatch to trigger workflows on the hw-ui-service repository. Any changes made to the files in the gh-actions-wf workflow repository will trigger a unit test on the hw-ui-service repository, ensuring that changes are tested. GitHub Actions is set to listen for push events on the develop branch. The hw-ui-service repository utilizes the reusable workflows in its precommit.yml file, which is configured to listen for repository_dispatch events of the ci-unittest type.

Workflow Execution

Whenever a change is made to the reusable workflow repository, it triggers a GitHub API call to initiate the unit tests on the invoked hw-ui-service repository.

Branch Structure:

• Develop Branch: The default branch for development changes to reusable workflow templates.
• Main Branch: The production branch that contains only promoted changes that have been tested.

Changes to gh-actions-wf trigger an API call to initiate unit tests on other repositories - GitHub Actions for gh-actions-wf

Testing Reusable Workflows on Invoked Repositories

Changes made to the workflow repository will trigger unit tests on the hw-ui-service repository to verify that the changes are functioning as expected - GitHub Actions for hw-ui-service

By implementing unit testing for reusable workflows, we can ensure that changes are thoroughly validated before being applied to dependent repositories. This practice not only enhances the reliability of our CI/CD processes but also fosters a culture of quality and accountability within development teams.

References

• GitHub Documentation on workflow_dispatch
• GitHub Documentation on repository_dispatch