CI/CD basic implementation based on GitHub Actions

[ia]

TL;DR: utilize GitHub capabilities to make builds on every commit and on every pull-request.

Hello. I'm a bit surprised that this haven't been done yet. So I decided to take some liberty to help with that. There may be a lot of room for improvements in the future but this is work-able proof-of-concept which can be merged & adopted as is currently in my humble opinion. However, to fully integrate push.yml into hydrafw github project, admins may need to set some additional settings somewhere in Settings of the project using GitHub web interface manually.

The benefits are:

• always be sure that current code at least build-able;
• without need to enroll local devel environment, advanced users who just will need dfu-util, always be able to get the latest fresh build from main branch;

Partially this overlaps with #132 and I can't promise anything but every time I have some free time I try to keep contributing around these CI/CD improvements as well.

Now, to technical details so everyone who is interested & curious could be on the same page. Basically, push.yml here is the most minimal declarative file which tells GitHub to start Ubuntu 22.04 VM, then to start Debian oldstable container inside, install toolchain packages, build hydrafw.dfu and upload it as hydrafw.dfu artifact. The live "demo" can be seen in my forked repo here:

• overview
• latest green build
• artifact section
• direct link to hydrafw.zip

Now, why such "matreshka" with VMs/containers, you may ask. Well, GitHub doesn't have Debian oldstable to run it directly, but we can start it from VM which is available on GitHub. After tries & errors Debian oldstable has been picked as [so far] the most suitable one, since:

• it has git with fresh enough version to support actions/checkout@v4 (it needs git > 2.17)
• it has old enough GCC toolchain where LTO for ChibiOS doesn't have a strange issue (sample log from one of my builds)

If you have any other questions, just let me know.

Oh, and that tiny update for python script comes from specific behavior of GitHub actions: on every checkout before build, GitHub infrastructure doesn't make full valid git checkout but downloads source tree in detached state so getting meta information about repo and its status (tag, revision, sha, etc.) may be tricky because I saw that with other GitHub projects so for a while we set revision as 0.0 for GitHub builds (which is default value) but it's even good in its own way because by that it will be the indicator that it is the latest upstream mainline build but not a stable release.

[ia]

Ok, it seems that after all with the power of bash & git commands we can get all needed meta information at the time of building on github to embed version string.

The question remains what string should be put into hydrafw.dfu, so considering my comment above just let me know and I will do some further modifications. I hope my comments are not looking rude in any way because I was just trying to figure things out. Will return to this in a day or too.

[bvernoux]

Ok, it seems that after all with the power of bash & git commands we can get all needed meta information at the time of building on github to embed version string.

The question remains what string should be put into hydrafw.dfu, so considering my comment above just let me know and I will do some further modifications. I hope my comments are not looking rude in any way because I was just trying to figure things out. Will return to this in a day or too.

We must just build it like it was done on computer it create src/common/hydrafw_version.hdr which is then used during build and those informations will be present in the final dfu (like it is in the bin ...) so there is nothing more to do
Example content of src/common/hydrafw_version.hdr created during build with latest commit:

#define HYDRAFW_GIT_TAG "v0.11-22-g34e3d63"
#define HYDRAFW_CHECKIN_DATE "2024-02-23"

In my case I'm using https://github.com/hydrabus/hydrafw of course in your case with your fork you will have different commit ...
When I check your fork https://github.com/ia/hydrafw you have +60 commits more (but your issue is that you do not have any tags in your fork see https://gist.github.com/kayagultekin/557975964ae26b99b46be3082ee828cf#what-about-syncing-tags) vs https://github.com/hydrabus/hydrafw and your latest commit ia@1e882a1 done on 2024-02-27, so we should have src/common/hydrafw_version.hdr:

#define HYDRAFW_GIT_TAG "v0.11-82-g1e882a1"
#define HYDRAFW_CHECKIN_DATE "2024-02-27"

At the end we shall find in the bin & dfu HydraFW (HydraBus) v0.11-82-g1e882a1 2024-03-27

[ia]

Ookay, some status update.
Here is the content of hydrafw_version.hdr from local build on my local machine from my git feature branch:

#define HYDRAFW_GIT_TAG "v0.11-85-gb0f78b2"
#define HYDRAFW_CHECKIN_DATE "2024-03-29"

And here is the content of hydrafw_version.hdr from GitHub build here:

$ strings hydrafw.dfu  | grep v0.11
HydraFW (HydraBus) v0.11-86-gb0f78b2 2024-03-29

Are these appropriate results? Just asking for confirmation before cleaning up all those printf debugging stuff from scripts before final merge.

[ia]

Hello. Sorry to bother, but I'm just giving a friendly reminder of the most recent update since I'm very curious what you think.

So, could you, please, just give me the feedback about the current patch-set for this pull-request. Although I understand that we all may be very busy sometimes so take your time, of course, so I'm not rushing, but just giving an update. Thank you.

[bvernoux]

All seems good for me
Baldanos what do you think ?

[Baldanos]

Looks good to me.

@ia Thank you for the contribution !

[bvernoux]

Thanks for your contribution

[bvernoux]

I have created a new issue #168 as the build has failed (after merge)