GitHub Actions: Feedback to reusable workflows

[borekb]

Hi, I'm trying to use reusable workflows and have two pieces of feedback:

1: I cannot reference a reusable workflow via relative path

We have a shared deployment logic that I've put into deploy-reusable.yaml and then we have two "real" workflows, deploy-preview.yaml and deploy-production.yaml, where I'd like to do this:

name: Deploy
on: push
jobs:
  deploy-preview:
    name: Preview
    uses: ./deploy-reusable.yaml
    with:
      deploymentKind: preview

However, the only accepted form is {owner}/{repo}/{path}/{filename}@{ref} (I tried 😄) so I have to do this:

1. Make changes in deploy-reusable.yaml
2. Commit it so that I have a SHA for the next steps
3. Update all the workflows that call it, e.g.
   • deploy-preview.yaml:

     name: Deploy
     on: ...
     jobs:
       deploy-preview:
         name: Preview
         uses: our-org/our-repo/.github/workflows/deploy-reusable.yaml@c623e1c3cc623411d19b805620ba191b57f8ea8f
         with:
           deploymentKind: preview

   • deploy-production.yaml:

     name: Deploy
     on: ...
     jobs:
       deploy-preview:
         name: Production
         uses: our-org/our-repo/.github/workflows/deploy-reusable.yaml@c623e1c3cc623411d19b805620ba191b57f8ea8f
         with:
           deploymentKind: production

4. Commit those files
5. Push the two commits

This double committing and inability to test changes in one go is quite annoying.

2: Name of the called workflow is shown in "checks" UI

This is mostly a cosmetic issue but the checks UI (e.g., at the end of pull requests) shows "{Workflow name} / {Job name}" so before, we had "Deploy / Preview" and "Deploy / Production".

Newly, as a side effect of the YAML refactoring, there's another part:

It feels a little bit wrong that a change of YAML structure also affects the readability of our checks UI. I think that the called workflow job name shouldn't be printed in the checks UI.

[ethomson]

Hi @borekb - thanks for the feedback. We're working on the first part now.

We'll give some thought to the names in the checks UI. I've run into some length issues there myself but we've got a few other issues that we're going to look at first. Thanks again!

[borekb]

Thanks, and also yay for the new "Actions and Packages Feedback" category 🎉.

Regarding the second point, the main problem is the presence of name of the internal / called workflow. In the example above, the checks UI should show e.g.:

Deploy / Preview

but it shows

Deploy / Preview / {Name of the internal job}

[dentuzhik]

Regarding length issues, reusable workflows made it even harder to read titles inside the workflow visualiser, which has no real way to resize left nav or panels, some examples below:

[umarcor]

Ref: #9050