Zip Code Base with Github Actions for Releases

Keith Weaver

Oct 24, 2019·3 min read

The original post can be found here.

In this tutorial, we will use Github Actions to zip the code base and create a new release with it.

Code Base Setup

You will need a Github repository and access to Github Actions. First step, clone your repository and switch into it. We will begin to create empty files in the folder. These files represent a simple app.

touch README.md
touch main.py
touch .gitignore

Push the changes to the master branch.

git add --all
git commit -m "Added basic files"
git push

Workflow Setup

We will use the zip command: zip -r release.zip .. This is zip into a file called release.zip and zip up the current directory (.).

Create a workflow here:

mkdir -p ./.github/workflows/
touch ./.github/workflows/master.yml

The contents should be:

name: MasterDeployCI
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v1
    - name: Zip Folder
      run: zip -r release.zip .
    - name: Release to Github
      run: echo "Release"

Then push your changes to the remote repository:

git add --all
git commit -m "Added workflow for master"
git push

As you can see it worked, but we zipped too much. We don’t want to zip the .git folder, the .github folder or the .gitignore file.

We can use -x. We can also test this locally (if on Ubuntu or OSx):

name: MasterDeployCI
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v1
    - name: Zip Folder
      run: zip -r release.zip . -x ".git/*" ".github/*"
    - name: Release to Github
      run: echo "Release"

Release

We are going to use this release/tagging. You can look at this this release/taggingawesome list of actions for a range of actions.

Update the workflow to be:

name: MasterDeployCI
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v1
    - name: Create Release Folder
      run: rsync -arv --exclude='.git/' --exclude='.github/' --exclude='.gitignore' . ./release
    - name: Switch to Release Folder
      run: |
        cd release
        ls -la
    - name: Bump version and push tag
      uses: anothrNick/github-tag-action@master
      env:
        GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        REPO_OWNER: keithweaver