GitHub Actions

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Travis - what has bothered me

Since using Travis there have been a few things that I've always hoped we could improve.

• Being able to cancel jobs one they've been triggered
• Better integration with our PR's (something more than the basic info Travis jobs can provide)
• More control of reusable code snippets and jobs
  • Using a local cache to build our jobs
  • Building our images once and passing them to each job
• Less Bash scripting
• Better logging of what failed - at a glance
• A less confusing UI

Why GitHub Actions

• Many articles comparing Travis vs. GHA
  • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28461528
  • https://www.nymedia.no/en/blog/why-we-decided-migrate-from-travis-to-github-action
  • https://earthly.dev/blog/ci-comparison/
• Convenience - click on Actions tab above!
• More expandable with community maintained workflows
• More extensive documentation
• Better integration with PR's/GitHub
• Same price point
• Ability to replace GH runners (VMs) with cheaper runners
  

Improvements (so far)

• Ongoing jobs can now be cancelled by new commits
• See which consistency and pytests tests failed (and info) at a glance in the Actions overview
• Docker caches are stored on GitHub (10Gb) for faster builds
• Builds and pushes of images happen once (as opposed to twice in Travis)
  • Pytest and consistency tests depend on this workflow
• Cleanup to docker_run.sh
• Less bash
• More fragmentation of files
  • Build code and preparation code live independently of our test code