Home Assignment 6: Continuous Integration (CI) and GitHub Actions

Part 1: CI with GitHub Actions

1. Setting up a repo

   git remote add origin https://github.com/alkon/ci-github-actions-demo.git

2. Basic GiHub Action Workflow

• Created workflow that runs whenever code is pushed to the main branch

  on:
     push:
       branches:
         - main 

• Checkout the code using actions/checkout.
• Run a shell command to print to the GitHub Actions hello logs

    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - name: Print hello log
        run: echo "Hello, CI with GitHub Actions"

3. Running Tests

• This project uses simple Python tests — no special dependencies or frameworks are required to run them.
• pyptest chosen to run tests and there it has to be installed, say, using pip
  • Note: there is no need to install pip manually - it was already installed when used actions/setup-python
• So added the step to install pytest

    - name: Install pytest
      run: pip install pytest

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Part 2: Advanced GitHub Actions Features

4. Cron Scheduling

• The workflow is triggered daily at midnight UTC

on:
  push: # for test only
  schedule:
    - cron: '0 0 * * *'

• Added the steps to checkout the existed code and to print to the GitHub Action logs

    steps:
      - name: Checkout code
        uses: actions/checkout@v4
    
      - name: Print log
        run: echo "Scheduled build completed successfully!"

5. Matrix build

• It tests across multiple Python versions and operating systems.

• The Python versions used are 3.12 and 3.13.

• The operating systems are Ubuntu and Windows.

• This results in 4 parallel jobs in total:

  OS	Python Version
  ubuntu-latest	3.12
  ubuntu-latest	3.13
  windows-latest	3.12
  windows-latest	3.13

  • Key part of the workflow YAML that defines the build matrix:

    strategy:
      matrix:
        python: [3.12, 3.13]
        os: [ubuntu-latest, windows-latest]

    • Note: Setting fail-fast: false ensure that all matrix jobs run to completion, even if one job fails.
    • This allows to see test results across all combinations of Python versions and OS

        strategy:
          fail-fast: false
          matrix:
          [...]

Self-Hosted GitHub Actions Runner Setup

a. Download and Install the Runner

1. Create a folder to store the runner files:

  mkdir actions-runner && cd actions-runner

2. Download the latest runner package for macOS:

    curl -o actions-runner-osx-x64-2.323.0.tar.gz -L https://github.com/actions/runner/releases/download/v2.323.0/actions-runner-osx-x64-2.323.0.tar.gz

3. Extract the installer:

  tar xzf ./actions-runner-osx-x64-2.323.0.tar.gz

b. Configure the Runner

Start the configuration process by running the following command:

   ./config.sh --url https://github.com/alkon/ci-github-actions-demo --token YOUR_TOKEN

• Note: Replace YOUR_TOKEN with the authentication token provided by GitHub when setting up the self-hosted runner in your repository settings.

c. Run Self-Hosted Runner

Start the runner:

   ./run.sh

• Note: This command will keep the runner running and listening for jobs.

d. Using Self-Hosted Runner in GitHub Workflows

• Update GitHub Actions YAML file for the required job with the following configuration:

jobs:
  job-name:
    runs-on: self-hosted