setup-vdat-action

Action archived on July 8, 2024 due to Innovasea's restrictive EULA

This action installs the VDAT executable that drives Innovasea's Fathom software. Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems are supported. It does this by downloading the current version of VDAT housed in the Ocean Tracking Network Data Centre's (OTNDC) GitLab instance utilizing a GitLab personal access token (PAT) and the GitLab API.

It is important that you do not directly supply your Personal Access Token!

Only do so using a GitHub secret!

To gain a personal access token and supply it as a GitHub Secret:

1. Contact the OTNDC to open a GitLab account with access to the VDat Working Group repository.
2. After logging in, click your profile picture.
3. Click "Preferences", then, under "User Settings", click "Access Tokens".
4. Click the "Add new token" button.
5. Give the token a name and expiration date; this is a tradeoff between saftey (short life) and ease (long life).
6. Under "Select scopes" select "read repository".
7. Copy the token. Note that you will not be able to see the PAT again once you leave this page. Luckily it's easy to make another.
8. In the GitHub repository that will use the action, select "Settings" > "Secrets and variables" > "Actions"
9. Under "Repository secrets" click "New repository secret"
10. Paste in your copied PAT, give the secret a name, and click "Add secret". Note that you will not be able to see this value again, only delete or replace it.
11. In your repository's workflow file, supply the token to the gitlab-auth argument as ${{ secrets.YOUR_TOKEN_NAME }}. In the example below, the PAT is stored in a secret called "GITLAB_TOKEN" and is supplied using gitlab-auth: ${{ secrets.GITLAB_TOKEN }}

Inputs

• gitlab-auth: A GitHub Secret that holds a personal access token to the OTNDC's VDat Working Group GitLab. A GitLab account with access to the VDat Working Group repository is currently necessary to utilize this action.
• vdat-repo: Not currently implemented; TBD
• vdat-version: Not currently implemented; TBD

Outputs

• Currently no output, though the result of vdat --help is printed to confirm installation. Future version will output the installed VDAT version as an environmental variable.

Usage

You can see this action in action in the testing workflow of the rvdat R package. The action can be used as below in a more-general manner:

jobs:
  set-up-vdat:
    strategy:
      matrix:
        os: [ubuntu-latest, windows-latest, macos-latest]
    
    runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }}

    name: VDAT for ${{ matrix.os }}
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
      
      - name: Set up VDAT
        uses: mhpob/setup-vdat-action@v1
        with:
          gitlab-auth: ${{ secrets.GITLAB_TOKEN }}

License