After a little tinkering about with Github Actions, I decided to write one to scratch an itch I’d been having at work. Github actions react to various events , one of which is Github wiki updates (awesomely named as Gollum events). Unfortunately the various actions I tried from the market place (which take events and then ping slack with details) simply sent a message saying a wiki page was updated and never actually said WHICH page was updated. So I decided it was probably worth while to write up my own to learn how Github Actions work under the covers.
Now, most of what I learned I got off Jacob Tomlinsons great post. I won’t reproduce what he already covers (far better than I could), but just wanted to list a few points that took me a little to realise.
Firstly, it’s in the YML file (an action is configured by yaml… I wont comment) that event types are configured. So in the case of reading wiki/gollum events, the yaml file will have an "on: gollum" entry. This means that the rest of the action (which is compiled on each execution) won’t actually get run except when it’s really needed.
Secondly, if you just want to run something when a particular event is triggered you don’t actually need to read the payload (with a TONNE of info in it). This is what a lot of actions seem to do, but for my situation where I needed to know which wiki page was updated, I needed the specifics. For the specifics you’ll need to read an environment variable (see big list) called GITHUB_EVENT_PATH. This is a path to a file that you then read, and this file has all the specifics of the event triggered. Although some might scoff at the relatively low tech approach to this, I really like it. Read filename from environment variable, then read the file. Easy peasy.
The file is simply JSON (see the events link earlier) and you can deserialise into a class/struct/whatever-suits-your-language easily enough. From there, grab the info you want and pass that to Slack. In the case of Go, the wonderfully useful Json-to-Go site makes this trivial.
Now that I’ve got to grips with writing actions in Go, I’m certain I’ll be writing more. There are many cases where I can picture them being VERY useful in my day-to-day work.
The particular action I wrote up is precious
Kens Ramblings 