CI as development companion

[inkdot7]

First, let me admit that I've not read the manuals.
Also, I did not do very much r3broot or github coding. So I maybe just did not find the way to do this right...

When I hacked on some changes, it seems that CI building for code developed by users is not very easy, since a user would push to his/her own github repository, where CI is not set up to be done. This means that CI only happens at the point when the user does a full PR.

When developing on other projects, I've found it very useful to have CI builds happens for any branch. With that, it becomes 'feelgood'-boosting to do small commits early, and push to some dummy branch of a repository. Then the CI fires off and rather quickly would notify about breaking changes. Long before thinking about making a PR. Sure, one does local testing too, but the CI machines are just tireless and happily run all tests (for obscure platforms / other experiments / etc...) - every time.

It is like having a development companion. It is of course a rather limited peer in that it does not find overall idea faults - just compile issues and other things that manage to break testing.

So, lots of git add -p, git commit and git push somewhere master:dummy.

Is this doable here as well?

[jose-luis-rs]

I think that one can execute the CIs from his/her own github repository using the button Actions --> select the CI test --> Run workflow -> select branch

But I am not sure if this option works for all the users!

[inkdot7]

When i click Actions, I get the view in the picture above, but there are no workflows. (That is perhaps not so surprising.) It just says Actions, All Workflows, Management, Caches. And there is a button New workflow.

If I click the new workflow button, one gets a panel of many buttons, none of which seems like the obvious choice. At the top is a link though set up a workflow yourself. Click that opens a editor to create a file R3BRoot/.github/workflows/main.yml (in master). But that is empty, and when looking in the repository, that file actually already exist!

So as a test, I copy the content of the existing file into the editor. No good, trying to commit says 'A file with the same name already exists. Please choose a different name and try again.' So I save as main2.yml. Then going into the Actions again, there are indeed two workflows called 'CI'. But they are in 'Queued' state. Which of course is good, as they should not get automatic access to the actual worker nodes out of nothing...

[inkdot7]

After being added to the R3BRootGroup, thanks @kresan , I can start a workflow run.
Then the question will be how to have that happen automatically on push to any branch...