Custom Github Actions

Github Actions does provide us the ability to write our own custom actions that can be integrated with the rest of the pipeline. This repository makes use of two:

• Initializer Action
• Information Action

Creating custom actions is detailed here. The convention for each action is have its metadata file (action.yml) in the same directory as its source code (if necessary).

Information Action (info/action.yml)

The information action retrieves information about each package present in the repository, namely:

• Has this package changed relative to the master branch?
• Name of the package
• Directory of the package
• Does the package require playwright?

In the case of bundles or tabs, it also retrieves the name of the bundle or tab.

In case of changes to the lockfile, it also determines which packages need to be rebuilt. This can happen when dependencies of dependencies change, so no change is present in the package's source code itself, but the lockfile itself has changed.

This information is used by both the initializer action and the workflows to determine the what tasks need to be executed.

Initializer Action (init/action.yml)

The initializer action combines the initialization steps that are necessary for each package:

1. Enable corepack
2. Install dependencies for that workspace (using yarn workspaces focus)
3. Install playwright if necessary (using yarn playwright install --with-deps)

INFO

Though theoretically this action should also include actions/checkout since that action is repeated across the different packages, because the initializer action is a custom action, the code for the action needs to be checked out before this action can be run.

Thus, the initializer action has to run after actions/checkout has completed and so it has to be a separate step.