OpenSAFELY Research Action

This repo provides a GitHub Action for verifying that OpenSAFELY research repos can run correctly.

It is written as a "composite run steps" action.

Usage

You can invoke this action from a Github workflow file (e.g. .github/workflows/opensafely_tests.yaml) like so:

name: Test that the project pipeline runs using dummy data

on: [push, workflow_dispatch]
env:
  GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - uses: opensafely-core/research-action@v2

The research-template repo includes such a workflow file already.

Honeytail

The Action also extracts stats from the test run and sends them to our Honeycomb research-action dataset, via honeytail. The action will run using the latest honeytail docker image. If you need to update the docker image, run:

just docker/build
docker tag honeytail ghcr.io/opensafely-core/honeytail:latest
docker push ghcr.io/opensafely-core/honeytail:latest

To build a dev image that will push to a test dataset (research-action-test):

just docker/build-dev
just docker/run <path/to/log/file> <HONEYCOMB_API_KEY>

Tests

Github actions are very difficult to test locally. The approach we use is to a) lint locally using https://github.com/rhysd/actionlint and b) use Github as our test runner, effectively doing integration tests.

So, to test, you need to first run lint:

make lint

When ready, commit and push your changes to github, which will run the integration test suite in parallel. If you have the gh cli installed, you can check on the state of the test run:

gh pr status

Releasing a new version

Existing workflow files reference this repo using the v2 tag. If you make backwards compatible changes to this repo you'll need to update the v2 tag:

make tag-release

Breaking changes should use a new version tag so that tests for existing repos continue to pass.