How we use GitHub Actions for continuous integration and automation¶

What GitHub Actions do¶

We use GitHub Actions on consumerfinance.gov to perform the following tasks:

• Run automated lint checkers
• Run automated unit tests
• Measure unit test coverage
• Build and deploy this documentation to GitHub on the gh-pages branch.
• Clean up stored artifacts

How GitHub Actions are configured¶

We use the following constraints to optimize our CI builds for speed and utility:

• Our linting and unit tests run on pull requests only, including subsequent pushes to a pull request's branch. Tests are not run on the main branch.
• Our documentation is deployed on merges and pushes to the main branch only, and not on pull requests.
• We do not run builds of any kind on any other branches that are not main, and that are not pull request branches.
• We store coverage artifacts in between the unit test jobs and the coverage jobs. This requires us to run an action every hour using the purge-artifacts action to clean up these stored artifacts.

We use a combination of:

• Build matrices to run the same tests on different versions of our dependnecies
• Additional services to provide, for example, PostgreSQL for our tests

Our workflows are defined in our .github/workflows directory.

An extra task for satellite repositories¶

For our satellite apps, we use GitHub Actions (or Travis, if a repo hasn't been migrated to Actions yet) to build and attach a deployment wheel file to every release.

An example is the .whl file on this release of the retirement app.