actions

I just spent the past 6 hours migrating some of my open source projects from Travis CI to GitHub Actions, and I thought I'd pause for a bit (12 hours into this project, probably 15-20 more to go) to jot down a few thoughts.

I am not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. For almost a decade, Travis CI made it possible for me to build—and maintain, for years—hundreds of open source projects.

I have built projects for Raspberry Pi, PHP, Python, Drupal, Ansible, Kubernetes, macOS, iOS, Android, Docker, Arduino, and more. And almost every single project I built got immediate integration with Travis CI.

Without that testing, and the ability to run tests on a schedule, I would have abandoned most of these projects. But with the testing, I'm able to keep up with build failures induced by bit rot over the years and review PRs more easily.

What went wrong with Travis CI?

From the outset, Travis CI was built to integrate with GitHub repositories and offer free open source CI. At one time it was showered with praise on Hacker News and elsewhere for its culture and ethos.

For many new Ansible-based projects, I build my tests in Molecule, so I can easily run them locally or in CI. I also started using GitHub Actions for many of my new Ansible projects, just because it's so easy to get started and integrate with GitHub repositories.

I'm actually going to talk about this strategy in my next Ansible 101 live stream, covering Testing Ansible playbooks with Molecule and GitHub Actions CI, but I also wanted to highlight one thing that helps me when reviewing or observing playbook and molecule output, and that's color.

By default, in an interactive terminal session, Ansible colorizes its output so failures get 'red' color, good things / ok gets 'green', and changes get 'yellow-ish'. Also, warnings get a magenta color, which flags them well so you can go and fix them as soon as possible (that's one core principle I advocate to make your playbooks maintainable and scalable).

One thing that was not obvious when I was setting up GitHub Actions on the Ansible Kubernetes Collection repository was how to have a 'CI' workflow run both on pull requests and on a schedule. I like to have scheduled runs for most of my projects, so I can see if something starts failing because an underlying dependency changes and breaks my tests.

The documentation for on.schedule just has an example with the workflow running on a schedule. For example:

Separately, there's documentation for triggering a workflow on events like a 'push' or a 'pull_request':