Upcoming Version 4 Discussion

[JamesIves]

Version 4 Beta 🚨🚨🚨

Version 4 has now been released. Please refer to the README!

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This thread outlines some of the plans for version 4. You can point your workflow to releases/v4 to try it early, and you can find the dev branch here.

Latest release changes (Look for V4 prereleases): https://github.com/JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action/releases

Implemented Changes

• Obsoleted LFS and PRESERVE: Stop checking out workspace #515
• ESLint for tests: Set up eslint for test files. #517
• dry-run capabilities: Test current code base as an integration test for PRs and pushes #505
• Remove the need for the GITHUB_TOKEN input variable: Remove the need for the GITHUB_TOKEN variable #525
• CodeQL Adjustments: Adjust codeql action to latest recommendations #540
• PR based integration tests: Test current code base as an integration test for PRs and pushes #505
• Automate deployment task: Add workflow to update build and node_modules on release branches #541
• Automate release branch deployments.
• Improve the CLEAN_EXCLUDE user experience
• Make input variables lowercase in the documentation to be more consistent with other actions. (Needs to be adjusted in action.yml before release is cut)
• Hyphenate arguments instead of lower_snakes
• Point integration tests to the release/v4 branch in dev-v4.
• Update security support docs.
• Support SSH key configuration natively: Support deploying via SSH natively  #459 (Native SSH Key Support #569)
• Add dev support for GitHub Codespaces.
• Prevent previously set git configs from interfering with deployment.
• Overall README sweep.
• Improved logo/artwork.
• Fully deprecate and drop v1 support via the master branch.

Open Pull Requests

Under Review/Discussion

Discussion

If you have any suggestions/ideas please make a separate thread for consideration. The plan is to release version 4 at the end of the year.

[Pike]

About the README:

The github actions use lower-case arguments in documentation, should we do so here, too? getInput is case-insensitive, so this should really just be a documentation issue?

PS: Thanks for the merges ;-)

[JamesIves]

I like it, let's make these lowercase.

Related issue: #531

[Pike]

About integration tests:

With integration tests running (and hopefully passing with dry-run), can integration-beta.yml and its corresponding branch go away?

[JamesIves]

I think so yes! That way we have coverage on pull requests, and daily scheduled checks on the live release branch.

[Pike]

One more thing that I'd suggest for v4:

Deploy production node modules on the release branch only.

The existing release branch already has dev dependencies, too, but that'd be easy to fix.

My rationale is really just personal taste, I like to keep production environments tidy.

[JamesIves]

Agreed. I'd actually like to automate these deployments via a workflow job. GitHub Actions lets you manually trigger workflows now, which would remove the need to manually switch branches and actually run the yarn commands manually. So yeah, if this was automated it would resolve a lot of minor issues like this.

It would need to do the following

• Push dev branch to release/v4 (We can just use the deploy action to commit this)
• Checkout release branch, run the yarn install command and commit the prod dependencies.

And then once the job is done, all that would be left is to tag the release branch and write the changelog, and it would then handle the rest via the publish task. Might as well go full automation as that's the only manual part left in the process lol.

[Pike]

What do you think about releases/v4...Pike:releases/v4 ?

[JamesIves]

Looks good to me! 🎉

[Pike]

Created #541 for that change

[JamesIves]

Regarding CLEAN_EXCLUDE UX:

I think it might be a better idea to have a comma seperated list, ie .nojekyll, .gitconfig as opposed to a string formatted as an array. It feels more natural to do this as we're sort of breaking the norms of an array by expecting every item to be a string, plus it just feels weird to type out like that.

I'll likely make this change over the weekend if there's no opposition.

[Pike]

actions/toolkit#184 mentions that upstream github actions use multiline strings as a workaround.

Maybe that's more future-proof? Also, avoids the problem of files with , 😄

[Pike]

I've thrown up a PR for this, #553 .

[JamesIves]

Sorry - will get to this soon. Still not feeling great. Probably after this weekend I'll be able to.

[Pike]

Should dev-v4 be the default branch now? In particular now that changes to the scheduled integration tests landed on it, those only start taking effect when it is.

[JamesIves]

Not just yet, I want to get through the major features in version 4 before we switch over the branches. I'd like to keep version 3 as the currently supported branch until then.

Probably this weekend I'll switch them over. 👍🏻

[JamesIves]

Hoping to wrap up the SSH changes sometime early next week, spent a good amount of time on it this weekend and I'm just testing a few last things before I will have a PR ready. Once that part is ready we can switch things over as that's the last major change in the release.

[JamesIves]

PR: #569

[JamesIves]

releases/v4 has been updated and a new beta version has been cut - I've put a note at the top of the thread calling for people to test this. Gonna push this up next weekend after testing and the remaining housekeeping tasks are done!

[JamesIves]

Aiming to push out v4 this week! 🎉

[Pike]

Is #567 about external repos a blocker? It seems that I broke pushing to external repos with the worktree patch?

[JamesIves]

Yeah, I'm going to convert it to an issue to make sure it's tracked. I'll also do some testing to ensure that this is an actual issue: #578

I also did a bunch of testing this evening ahead of the release and I've found a few blockers with repro steps which I've listed out here: https://github.com/JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Ablocker