Possible to persist checkout accross multiple jobs ?

[clmcgrath]

I am new to github actions and not sure if this is supported currently

we would like to setup multiple conditional jobs on a single repo
is it possible to persist the checked out files accross multiple jobs
ie

task checkout code 

task if has js changes 
    run npm install 
    run eslint 
    build & test on js 

task if has .net changes 
    nuget restore 
    build & test 
    on .net if has changes 

[otter-computer]

Each job runs in a fresh version of the virtual environment, so you'd need to checkout for each job. You can have multiple steps for each job, and the environment will remain across steps, but you aren't able to persist the environment entirely across separate jobs.

If you need to persist data across different jobs you may want have a look at using the artifact upload and download actions. This will allow you to pass files/folders between different jobs:

https://github.com/actions/upload-artifact
https://github.com/actions/download-artifact

Though for your specific use case I'd recommend looking at the syntax for the on statement, as it will allow you to trigger a workflow with a filter on a specific path, or type of file:

https://help.github.com/en/articles/workflow-syntax-for-github-actions#on

This repository is intended for issues specific to the actions/checkout action and not for help on using it in the greater scope of GitHub Actions. For questions like this I'd recommend writing in to GitHub Support in future! 🙏

[ethomson]

Thanks for the question, and I think that @ThomasShaped addressed it. So I'm going to close this issue - if you have additional feedback, please contact us.

[sushma-4]

Just checking in, is this still the same? Checkouts will not persist across different jobs?

[MartinX3]

Sadly it seems so

[keeshux]

Just in case someone else stumbles upon this. If you expect the job environment to be retained, that's because you assume that jobs execute within the same runner (read "machine"), which is not necessarily the case.

[joeythomaschaske]

It seems there needs to be a ton of setup duplication between jobs with github actions which is very unfortunate. A lot of wasted CPU time having to do common setup work in each job.

[jgwinner]

I ran into this recently again; search engine went right here, so I expect more people will end up here.

We'd been using our Self Hosted runners which give us a lot more control on lifetime of disk objects of course.

I THOUGHT that two jobs that run sequentially were supposed to use the same runner for efficiency, but part of the git checkout integration, post-action is to remove what was checked out, so this doesn't work on GitHub runners.

So, one thing if you have some VM's that are available might be to self-host, and do the checkout with git commands somewhere else, if you really need to use artifacts between jobs, and for some reason don't want the standard methods. You can only run one job at a time though.

With a new action, I found I don't need to branch as much or run on different VM's, so I'm trying to pack everything into one job. I had some jobs running on different servers, and some branching in most of our self-hosted stuff and had forgotten about the "everything you did to setup is now gone" thing. Doh.

[jgwinner]

Sorry, forgot the point - if this were possible as a flag or something in a .yml file, it would be really handy, cut down on duplication, downloads, etc.