How I accidentally took down GitHub Actions (2019) | Hacker News Reader

How I accidentally took down GitHub Actions (2019)

blog.teddykatz.com

142 pointsl1n14 comments

In case you don't recognize the syntax, this is HCL and was the system in use before it was changed to YML. This change seems to have been (partially) a result of being purchased by Microsoft since the HCL version ran on Google Cloud while the new one used Azure instances.

One of my acquisitions bet is that MS will eventually buy Hashicorp, so they might switch back to HCL one day :)

Question: What did,"https://api.github.com/repos/actions/docker/tarball/76ff57a" had anything to do with the OPs fork? Shouldn't it just point to the original repo which didn't had the clashing commit ?

So, OP has answered it and I missed it, Github shares commit hash between Forks and parent repo

Yeah, and it can lead to fun things like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24882921

> However, I realized I could get around that issue by forking the actions/docker repo and pushing a commit to my fork (since GitHub shares commits between forks and parent repositories).

It's a space-saving mechanism; since forks are extremely common, sharing commit trees across all of GitHub makes the forking action very cheap.

>I used GitHub’s configuration wizard to create a config file.

I wonder why this config UI never made it out of the beta. Sounds kinda handy...

Looks like the configuration format also changed before publicly released - Actions now uses a YAML file.

I suppose they might have figured the "New Workflow" UI that can add Starter Workflows is a suitable replacement.

https://github.com/actions/starter-workflows

Visual Studio Online (now Azure DevOps if it didn't change again) used to have a wizard/UI to create CI scripts. It was very handy and allow to create them quickly.

One day they imposed the YAML version (probably close or the same used now for GH actions) and it has been a huge pain to use: all discoverability is lost, and it's now a painful cycle of searching documentation with a search engine, try something, commit, lose build minutes, wait it to fail, restart at step one. I want the wizard back.

I totally agree.. I like the idea of YAML and source control for pipelines, but unless you're already very familiar with the system it is much slower. Fortunately there's a "Use the classic editor to create a pipeline without YAML" option to use the previous system.

is there? ive never seen that hutton on any repos at work.

The ui is no longer there, but there is indeed a wizard for yaml whereby you can select a task and have it generate the required yaml for you. The very cool thing is round tripping works as well.

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