Improving GH Action CI: build, lint, test

[thedavidprice]

Currently we are using GH Actions for CI, however, GH Actions are early and don’t support our setup (lerna and yarn workspaces for the CRA app). It might be best to move the redwoodjs/redwood CI to something like CircleCI as our needs continue to grow.

Caching

Ideally node_modules would be cached for root and each package (currently managed by lerna) using GH Actions Cache. See also how to cache dependencies.

This is not yet possible. Related:

• GH Actions not able to cache multiple workspace paths: /Cache multiple paths actions/cache#16
  • and related PR to add the multi-path support: Introduce paths input to support multiple cache paths actions/cache#180
• Node Docker Container support for Yarn2: Yarn 2 support nodejs/docker-node#1180
• Found Actions specific to Yarn 2 here: https://github.com/sergioramos/yarn-actions
  • which I found here: https://github.com/sdras/awesome-actions

Run only on “changed” packages

• employ something like lerna changed to build+test against modified packages only (need to choose what our reference will be… last npm release is more than needed but might be good enough first step. Ideally just new commits.)
• Might need to separate into two Actions: 1) build and 2) test

Other Actions to consider adding

• when new packages are published, auto-open PR on other repos that includes updated versions in packages.json Could possibly go as far as creating a new release of create-redwood-app (but don’t forget about needed to check for updates to yarn.lock)
• monitor build size: see Possible CI solution for monitoring build size #196

[peterp]

employ something like lerna changed to build+test against modified packages only (need to choose what our reference will be… last npm release is more than needed but might be good enough first step. Ideally just new commits.)

I think it's OK to run all the tests for all of the packages since a PR may include interdependent modifications over several packages.

Might need to separate into two Actions: 1) build and 2) test

I don't think "build" is going to give us anything actionable or useful during CI. Maybe when we're using Typescript?

[thedavidprice]

re: Modified packages
Ah, great point. I feel like I’ve seen something like this via CircleCI that must account for dependencies. The main object would be pre-emptive ways to reduce CI run time, which might not even be an issue near-term if at all. And/or caching node_modules to avoid unnecessary yarn install might be 80% of the efficiency gain anyway.

re: Build
It's just success/fail with the same output we get locally. Seems important to run given current low test coverage across packages (and increasing community PRs). Note: current running CI includes build, lint, and test. If it turns out to be unhelpful, can easily turn it off.

[thedavidprice]

Current GH Action has been working well with no complaints or experience with tediously long run time.

GH Action cache capability hasn’t budged and the only PR addressing multi-path caching was deemed unviable.

There’s a separate Issue already for monitoring build size, which is likely the only remaining prioity here.

Closing.