Discussion on Github Actions

[Ryan Cohen]

I started learning about Github Actions, since a bunch of the Ripes workflows would continuously fail in my forked repo. I have a few questions about how the Ripes workflow is setup. Figured that it'd make an interesting public discussion as well.

Firstly, I noticed that many workflows have the following run condition:

branches:
      - '*'

This causes these workflows to not run if the branch has the / character in it. I often prefix my branches with feature/ or fix/ to organize them and these workflows do not run when I push these branches. Was this done on purpose? Do you think it would be beneficial to use the following condition instead?

branches:
      - '**'

I think it would trigger these workflows on all branches (even if they contain /).

I also noticed that many workflows use secrets to automatically release. For example, wasm-release has the following token:

GH_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.MORTBOPET_GITHUB_IO_TOKEN }}

Since I don't have access to such secrets in my fork, the workflows that require secrets automatically fail. Do you know of any way that I could prevent only these workflows from running? I want to have all build workflows (ubuntu, macos, windows, wasm) run in my fork without any of the release workflows running.

I've been researching how Github Actions work, but I haven't yet found a way to disable specific workflows in my fork without changing the yml files. Perhaps we could change the release/artifact actions to add the following condition:

if: github.repository == 'mortbopet/Ripes'

I think this would make the release-based actions only run in your repository and not in any forks.

@mortbopet Please let me know what you think of these ideas.