shared-workflows

A public-facing, centralized place to store reusable GitHub workflows and action used by Grafana Labs. See the actions/ directory for the individual actions themselves.

Notes

Configure your IDE to run Prettier

Prettier will run in CI to ensure that files are formatted correctly. To ensure that your code is formatted correctly before you commit, set up your IDE to run Prettier on save.

Or from the commandline, you can run Prettier using npx:

npx prettier --check .

Or, of course, install it in any other way you want.

Pin versions

When referencing third-party actions, always pin the version to a specific commit hash. This ensures that the workflow will always use the same version of the action, even if the action's maintainers release a new version or if the tag itself is updated.

Dependabot can update these SHA references when there are new versions. If you include a tag in a commend after the SHA, it can update the comment too. For example:

- uses: action/foo@abcdef0123456789abcdef0123456789 # v1.2.3

Refer to other shared-workflows actions using relative paths

When referencing other actions in this repository, use a relative path. This will ensure actions in this repo are always used at the same commit. To do this:

- name: Checkout
  env:
    # In a composite action, these two need to be indirected via the
    # environment, as per the GitHub actions documentation:
    # https://docs.github.com/en/actions/learn-github-actions/contexts
    action_repo: ${{ github.action_repository }}
    action_ref: ${{ github.action_ref }}
  uses: actions/checkout@b4ffde65f46336ab88eb53be808477a3936bae11 # v4.1.1
  with:
    repository: ${{ env.action_repo }}
    ref: ${{ env.action_ref }}
    # substitute your-action with a unique name (within `shared-repos` for your
    # action), so if multiple actions check `shared-workflows` out, they don't
    # overwrite each other
    path: _shared-workflows-your-action

- name: Use another action
  uses: ./_shared-workflows-your-action/actions/some-action
  with:
    some-input: some-value

Use separate files for shell scripts so they're linted

Instead of embedding a shell script in the run string, write a separate script and refer to that.

For example, don't use the step:

id: echo-success
shell: bash
run: |
  echo "Success!"

Instead, create the file echo-success.bash in the same directory and use the step:

id: echo-success
shell: bash
run: ./echo-success.bash

Releasing a version of a component in shared-workflows

When working with shared-workflows, it's essential to avoid breaking backwards compatibility. To ensure this, we must provide releasable actions for engineers to review incoming changes. This also helps automated update tools like dependabot and renovate to work effectively.

Upon push to main, a draft PR with updates in the CHANGELOG.md will be updated or created. This can be undrafted and merged at any time to create the next tagged release. Since we're a monorepo, one PR will be created for each action/reusable workflow that has been updated. They can be released individually and tags will be of the form <name>-<semver version>.

In order for the release action to work properly, which means to generate a CHANGELOG for the current release, the pull request titles need to follow the Conventional Commits specification. This means that the PR should start with a type followed by a colon, and then a subject - all in lowercase.

Minor version bumps are indicated by new features: feat: add support for eating lollipops. Major version bumps are indicated by an ! after the type in the commit message/description, for example: feat!: rename foo input to bar.

Also, the PR description needs to be filled and should never be empty.

Failing to follow any of the aforementioned necessary steps, will lead to CI failing on your pull request.

More about how the upstream action works can be found here.

Add new components to Release Please config file

In order for components to be released, they must be in the release-please-config.json file. Always ensure new components are added to this file.