nim-hello-world

Experimenting with github actions on a Nim project.

Nim is not a supported language with actions yet so I started to experiment with different ways to build a Nim project.

• Test - Just run tests over multiple nim versions and operating systems in one action.
• Native Build - Download and compile nim, build app
• DockerHub Image Build - Build and publish images to DockerHub using multiple nim versions
• Github Packages Build - Build and publish docker image to Github Packages

Native Build

The code for the native build is found in build-native.yml. It sets up a nim environment by using choosenim to build the nim compiler. Once built, both nim and nimble are cached for subsequent runs in this same repository. The cache isn't shared with other repositories unfortunately.

It compiles the executable and publishes it as a build artifact.

Docker Image Builds

The code is available in either

• build-image-dockerhub.yml
• build-image-gh-packages.yml

depending on where the final Docker image is published.

We're using Docker base images that already have Nim and Nimble installed in it so we get to skip the manual install step.

The Github Actions use files in dockerfiles/ for the builds.

Resources

To learn more, see the following:

• Nim docker images - nimlang/nim
• Docker multi-stage builds
• Dockerfile best practices
• Using Docker with Github Packages