Provide GitHub Actions sample config within docs

[humanmade]

Provide GitHub Actions sample config within docs

[kadamwhite]

I posted about this on our internal dev list, so cross-posting the relevant content here.

The goal is to adapt Altis' composer dev-tools phpunit command to GitHub Actions. I turned first to John's testing workflow for the Authorship plugin, which provides a great baseline. However, the composer install step in that action didn't work for the Altis project I was working on because the project pulls in multiple private GitHub repositories via composer. Most of the complexity in the post below is due to private Composer VCS dependencies, and to a TTY mode issue in Local Server.

Post about how I set up GH Actions on Altis

Install private composer dependencies

The php-actions/composer action supports private repositories by letting you inject an SSH key using GitHub Secrets. We followed this process:

• Create a new SI user GitHub account within the team's organization.
• Give that account read-only access to all the relevant dependency repositories.
• Generate a passwordless SSH key and add it to the user. (I tried using a key with a passphrase and spent a whole day wondering why it wouldn't work; d'oh)
• Add that SSH key as a GH secret in the settings for the main project repository
• Update the GitHub Action workflow file to look like this:

name: Unit Tests
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - 'staging'
      - 'main'
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - '**'

jobs:
  phpunit:
    strategy:
      matrix:
        php: ['7.4']
    name: PHPUnit on PHP ${{ matrix.php }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-18.04
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Cache Composer dependencies
        uses: actions/cache@v2
        with:
          path: /tmp/composer-cache
          key: ${{ runner.os }}-${{ hashFiles('**/composer.lock') }}

      - name: Install PHP dependencies
        uses: php-actions/composer@v6
        with:
          version: 1 # Composer 1
          php_version: ${{ matrix.php }}
          ssh_key: ${{ secrets.ssh_key }}
          ssh_key_pub: ${{ secrets.ssh_key_pub }}

We'll be switching over to Composer 2 soon, but for now this is the most straightforward way I could find to install Composer packages in GH Actions. The php-actions/composer action will ensure PHP is set up, so we don't need to manually install that as John did in Authorship. I've also copied the caching example from the composer action's documentation (although I haven't seen it actually speed things up at all).

Running PHPUnit in Docker

composer dev-tools phpunit executes the unit tests inside the running container. So, let's run Docker!

      - name: Start the containers
        run: |
          composer server start

Whoops. Job failed: vendor/docker-compose.yml is not writable, so the generation of the configuration file fails. OK, the Composer action must install as root. Composer doesn't like being run with sudo, so let's see if that action has an option to set the user... nope, doesn't seem like it. We'll just manually make the file writable instead:

      - name: Start the containers
        # Make the docker-compose file writeable, then start the server.
        run: |
          sudo touch vendor/docker-compose.yml
          sudo chown $(whoami) vendor/docker-compose.yml
          composer server start

Commit, push, and... heck.

TTY mode requires /dev/tty to be read/writable.

😬 I have no idea what that means. I can search the web, though! Hmm, alright, every article seems to want me to run set(‘git_tty’, false);. But, I don't want to have to modify Local Server. Let's do some research.

A ha! There's a post about this specific TTY issue in the context of GitHub Actions. It's a known issue, and there's a standard workaround!

Let's use script to run the composer server command in a "typescript" of a terminal session. That doesn't have anything to do with TypeScript: it means that only a log of the session gets passed back from the command, so we sidestep the lack of TTY.

      - name: Start the containers
        shell: 'script -q -e -c "bash {0}"'
        # Make the docker-compose file writeable, then start the server.
        run: |
          sudo touch vendor/docker-compose.yml
          sudo chown $(whoami) vendor/docker-compose.yml
          composer server start

Awesome, now the containers are pulling! And... the action still fails. The containers start, but it crashes out afterwards. The install was succeeding, but the error was instead triggered while trying to set up ElasticPress. We don't need ES to run our tests, so 🤫 let's just add continue-on-error: true to our command, and move on.

n.b. Rob has pointed out in a Slack thread that we could have solved this by setting the environment variable ES_MEM_LIMIT=2g. There are Altis docs about that issue. Anyway, now the containers are starting, and we can finally run our dev-tools command!

We have the same file permissions issue when running PHPUnit, because the dev-tools command creates vendor/phpunit.xml. I used the same approach as above to make that file individually writable, but in retrospect I could also have made the CI runner user the owner of the vendor directory itself.

Putting it all together

This is our complete PHPUnit action:

name: Unit Tests
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - 'staging'
      - 'main'
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - '**'

jobs:
  phpunit:
    strategy:
      matrix:
        php: ['7.4']
    name: PHPUnit on PHP ${{ matrix.php }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-18.04
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Cache Composer dependencies
        uses: actions/cache@v2
        with:
          path: /tmp/composer-cache
          key: ${{ runner.os }}-${{ hashFiles('**/composer.lock') }}

      - name: Install PHP dependencies
        uses: php-actions/composer@v6
        with:
          version: 1 # Composer 1
          php_version: ${{ matrix.php }}
          ssh_key: ${{ secrets.ssh_key }}
          ssh_key_pub: ${{ secrets.ssh_key_pub }}

      - name: Start the containers
        shell: 'script -q -e -c "bash {0}"'
        # Make the docker-compose file writeable, then start the server.
        run: |
          sudo touch vendor/docker-compose.yml
          sudo chown $(whoami) vendor/docker-compose.yml
          composer server start
        continue-on-error: true # ElasticPress may report failure

      - name: Run PHPUnit
        run: |
          sudo touch vendor/phpunit.xml
          sudo chown $(whoami) vendor/phpunit.xml
          composer dev-tools phpunit

Once I got all of this working, Rob also clued me in to the fact that Joe had gone through a similar process on another codebase. Instead of using the script trick, Joe's action uses sed to live-patch Local Server within the CI environment. Fixing things more permanently in Local Server would probably be a prerequisite to solving this ticket generally, because the more we can remove the confusing bits, the easier a scaffold command will be.

[roborourke]

Only thing preventing us is time and capacity, at the time GH actions weren't really suitable but I believe @joehoyle got it working and @kadamwhite too.

It's partially related to #102 and also the RFC for having a single dev dependency module for the local environments here https://github.com/humanmade/product-dev/pull/561

Ideally I'd like for devs to be able to choose their preferred CI environment by either using documented config or a scaffolding command like composer dev-tools scaffold travis or composer dev-tools scaffold github. I thought I'd captured that in an issue somewhere already but I guess not!