Publishing

Github actions

We use GitHub Actions, as the CI/CD pipeline.

GitHub Actions make it easy to automate all our software workflows. They build, test, and deploy the code right from GitHub.

All the heavy lifting is done by GitHub. GitHub will simply use the files defined in .github/workflows to do the setup.

We trigger the reusable workflow like this (note that the chart is slightly outdated):

Since we are using trunk based development, all pushes to main trigger a release to a test environment.

Release to production is triggered when we merge in the auto-generated pull requests (that contains changelogs) that are created by the create-release-pr.yaml Github action.

Workflows

Overview

Reusable workflows

Workflow	Job	Purpose
codeql-security-analysis.yaml	analyze	Runs CodeQL on the source code
create-release-pr.yaml	release-please	Creates a new release on GitHub
deploy-to-radix.yaml	deploy-on-radix	Deploys the services to Radix
generate-changelog.yaml	generate-changelog	Automatically generates changelogs based on commit messages
label-importer.yaml	labeler	Import labels from labels.yml
publish-docs.yaml	publish-docs	Builds and publishes the latest docs to GitHub pages
publish-image.yaml	build-and-publish-web-main	Builds and publishes the Docker image for the Web (frontend)
	build-and-publish-api-main	Builds and publishes the Docker image for the API (backend)
	build-and-publish-nginx	Builds and publishes the Docker image for the Nginx proxy
tests.yaml	pre-commit	Runs the pre-commit hooks. See Hooks for details
	test-api	Runs tests on the API (backend) using pytest and behave
	test-web	Runs tests on the Web (frontend)
	test-docs	Checks that the doc pages build without errors

Triggerable workflows

Workflow	Job	Purpose
on-pull-request.yaml	codeql	Uses the codeql-security-analysis workflow
	tests	Uses the tests workflow
on-push-main-branch.yaml	codeql	Uses the codeql-security-analysis workflow
	tests	Uses the tests workflow
	generate-changelog	Uses the generate-changelog workflow
	docs	Uses the publish-docs workflow
	publish-latest	Uses the publish-image workflow to create a docker image for the test environment
	deploy-test	Uses the deploy-to-radix workflow to deploy to the test environment
	release-please	Creates a new release PR on GitHub
	publish-production	Uses the publish-image workflow to create a docker image for the prod environment
	deploy-prod	Uses the deploy-to-radix workflow to deploy to the prod environment
on-weekly.yaml	codeql	Uses the codeql-security-analysis workflow

Reusable workflows

A reusable workflow is just like any GitHub Actions workflow with one key difference - it includes a workflow_call trigger.

• The create-release-pr.yaml workflow will automatically create a pull request with an auto-generated changelog. It also bumps the version code (using semantic versioning, depending on the types of commits) and create a tagged release that can be used to deploy to production.

• The tests.yaml workflow will automatically run all types of tests.

• The publish-docs.yaml workflow will build the documentation. Then it will deploy the documentation (placed in the site folder) to GitHub Pages.

Changelogs

We auto-generate changelogs by following the conventional commits specification.

How to generate

Auto-generated

The Github action release-please.yaml is a workflow that will automatically create a pull request with an auto-generated changelog every time code is pushed to the main branch.

Locally

Sometimes it is nice to generate the changelogs locally for testing.

It is possible to use act to run Github actions locally.

act -j release-please -s GITHUB_TOKEN=<GITHUB_TOKEN>

GITHUB_TOKEN: Log in to GitHub and generate a personal access token (PaT) from Personal settings -> Developer settings -> Personal access tokens.