[GitHub App] Provide an alternative to the .git folder for integration

[SimonAdameit]

Hello!

• Vote on this issue by adding a 👍 reaction
• If you want to implement this feature, comment to let us know (we'll work with you on design, scheduling, etc.)

Issue details

The Pulumi GitHub App determines the current commit by walking up the directory tree and looking for a .git folder.

This will not work in environments that only provide the relevant source files to a build (e.g. building in docker containers or a build system like pantsbuild, bazel, etc.).

The documentation that I found for the GitHub App also does not provide this information as of today.

Therefore:

• There should be an alternative way to provide the relevant information for the GitHub App to work
  (the suggestion here is to use an environment variable).
• The ways pulumi integrates with the GitHub App should be documented

References

• The slack thread where I asked for help to integrate the GitHub App with pulumi
• Another slack thread where this came up
• An issue that has been filed to improve the documentation around this.

[susanev]

thanks for opening up an issue @SimonAdameit! im going to move this over to service-requests, as the change to be made to fix this is in the pulumi-service.

[susanev]

aaand i guess i missed a follow-on convo to this, moving back to pulumi. sry about this!!

[mikhailshilkov]

@cnunciato Is it you who owns the GitHub App? I must say I don't even know where its source code is.

[susanev]

@mikhailshilkov theres more context in this community slack convo and this internal slack convo

[SimonAdameit]

There seems to be more involved in getting the GitHub App integration to work than providing access to the .git folder. Pulumi also uses environment variables to figure out the build environment. The relevant code seems to be here: https://github.com/pulumi/pulumi/tree/master/sdk/go/common/util/ciutil

This is unfortunate for container based build systems as the detection will not work the way it is done. Having something clearly defined and documented that could be explicitly passed in would be great.

This could e.g. be:

• a JSON configuration object
• a bunch of environment variables

[ray-vgw]

+1 to this. We're unable to have this work in our CI/CD tool (codefresh) due to the fact we use containers to do the preview steps.