TBH this discussion and the need for a lockfile for your CI makes me dizzy, is there something I'm missing wrt GHA that makes it awesome enough to be worth these tradeoffs?
For reference, I come from a Gitlab CI background and all I want is to specify a container, and the CI system should clone my repo in it and run some tests; perhaps optionally allow me to write stuff in a text file that can be displayed on the pull request or the commit (although Gitlab CI doesn't do that AFAIK). Is there something I'm missing due to which GHA architecture is so complicated?
Yeah, GHA has a massive plugin ecosystem. A common pattern is using an “action” from a plugin as one CI step/job. So these are dependencies that get resolved at runtime when GHA puts together your workload.
Other CI platforms have plugins, but the “plugins” in GitHub really get used as the core primitive of the system, which is part of what makes it so simple & easy to use… for really basic workflows. You just hook up a couple actions like this and you’re good to go, no shell scripting required. (Though you can totally do that too.)
I mean at the end of the day, it’s a big part of the value proposition, even if I prefer a much more bare metal approach. GHA is really not great at massive CI workloads.
Arguably, that's exactly the one action that will need to be hash-pinned, since all the consecutive actions will at least be verified against the lockfile.
From what I see, this does not help with pinning the dependencies and it doesn’t verify the downloaded action has the same content as it used to have. In other words, this is a tiny patch on a big wound.
We use commit hashes to pin actions, have the version as a comment (e.g # v4) and renovate will keep both up to date in the PRs.
And there is a more or less recently added repository setting to require actions to be pinned to hashes.
I don’t want to throw process at the problem. I think GH should provide a better system not the developers locking down dependencies and adding extra processes and steps to update the CI via a PR workflow. Not like PRs became the development bottleneck anyways for a lot of development teams these days. I wonder how we functioned 15 years ago with trunk based YOLO development.
I also think that it wasn’t the best idea to base versioning on mutable branches and not introduce a registry in the middle. Think about it. The whole system is build on node anyways. But we pull “dependencies” via a weak git clone system.
I have been banging on that drum for like 2 years now, glad the community has figured a way around it. Still utterly ridiculous that this is not native.
They even closed the immutable action issue as a "wont fix" cause you know when it's too hard we all know the best way is to give up. Not like there wasany major security incident this year due to this /s
For reference, I come from a Gitlab CI background and all I want is to specify a container, and the CI system should clone my repo in it and run some tests; perhaps optionally allow me to write stuff in a text file that can be displayed on the pull request or the commit (although Gitlab CI doesn't do that AFAIK). Is there something I'm missing due to which GHA architecture is so complicated?
Other CI platforms have plugins, but the “plugins” in GitHub really get used as the core primitive of the system, which is part of what makes it so simple & easy to use… for really basic workflows. You just hook up a couple actions like this and you’re good to go, no shell scripting required. (Though you can totally do that too.)
I mean at the end of the day, it’s a big part of the value proposition, even if I prefer a much more bare metal approach. GHA is really not great at massive CI workloads.
gjtorikian/gh-actions-lockfile@v1
Presumably since it has to run first it must run unpinned?
..and in the next update cycle, you will see all actions be pinned like this:
- uses: actions/checkout@8e8c483db84b4bee98b60c0593521ed34d9990e8 # v6
We use commit hashes to pin actions, have the version as a comment (e.g # v4) and renovate will keep both up to date in the PRs.
And there is a more or less recently added repository setting to require actions to be pinned to hashes.
Pin by hash.
Verify that the actions themselves aren't pulling in unpinned dependencies from Actions, NPM, or elsewhere.
Have a CI job or bot create PRs for new versions. Verify those PRs before merging.
If any particular action becomes a recurring chore or risk, consider if you should keep depending on it.
If you do these things, the "we need a package manager" is moot and most if not all of the concerns in that blog post don't affect you.
JavaScript actions are already bundled.
Just pin your actions to shasum
They even closed the immutable action issue as a "wont fix" cause you know when it's too hard we all know the best way is to give up. Not like there wasany major security incident this year due to this /s