Comment by spooneybarger | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spooneybarger | Hacker News Reader

A lot of folks in this thread are focusing on the monorepo aspect of things. The "Pull request and required checks" problem exists regardless of monorepo or not.

GitHub Actions allows you to only run checks if certain conditions are met, like "only lint markdown if the PR contains *.md files". The moment you decide to use such rules, you have the "Pull request and required checks" problem. No "monorepo" required.

GitHub required checks at this time allow you to use with external services where GitHub has no idea what might run. For this reason, required checks HAVE to pass. There's no "if it runs" step. A required check on an external service might never run, or it might be delayed. Therefore, if GH doesn't have an affirmation that it passed, you can't merge.

It would be wonderful if for jobs that run on GH where GH can know if the action is supposed to run, if required checks could be "require all these checks if they will be triggered".

I have encountered this problem on every non-trivial project I use with GitHub actions; monorepo or not.

This isn't really the problem, though. This is an easy problem to solve; the real problem is that it costs money to do so.

Also: I'm not asserting that the below is good, just that it works.

First, don't make every check a required check. You probably don't need to require that linting of your markdown files passes (maybe you do! it's an example).

Second, consider not using the `on:<event>:paths`, but instead something like `dorny/paths-filter`. Your workflow now runs every time; a no-op takes substantially less than 1 minute unless you have a gargantuan repo.

Third, make all of your workflows have a 'success' job that just runs and succeeds. Again, this will take less than 1 minute.

At this point, a no-op is still likely taking less than 1 minute, so it will bill at 1 minute, which is going to be $.008 if you're paying.

Fourth, you can use `needs` and `if` now to control when your 'success' job runs. Yes, managing the `if` can be tricky, but it does work.

We are in the middle of a very large migration into GitHub Actions from a self-hosted GitLab. It was something we chose, but also due to some corporate choices our options were essentially GitHub Actions or a massive rethink of CI for several dozen projects. We have already moved into code generation for some aspects of GitHub Actions code, and that's the fifth and perhaps final frontier for addressing this situation. Figure out how to describe a graph and associated completion requirements for your workflow(s), and write something to translate that into the `if` statements for your 'success' jobs.

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