juliankahnert / github-action-publish-binaries

Publish binaries when new releases are made.

GitHub Action for Uploading Release Artifacts

This repository contains a simple GitHub Action implementation which allows you to attach binaries to a new (github) release of your repository.

• GitHub Action for Uploading Release Artifacts
  • Enabling the action
  • Sample Configuration
  • GITHUB_TOKEN

Enabling the action

There are two steps required to use this action:

• Enable the action inside your repository.
  • This will mean creating a file .github/workflows/release.yml which is where the action is invoked.
  • You'll specify a pattern to describe which binary-artifacts are uploaded.
• Ensure your binary artifacts are generated.
  • Ideally you should do this in your workflow using another action.

Sample Configuration

The following configuration file uses this action, along with the github-action-build action to generate the artifacts for a project, then attach them to a release.

on:
  release:
    types: [created]
name: Handle Release
jobs:
  generate:
    name: Create release-artifacts
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout the repository
        uses: actions/checkout@master
      - name: Generate the artifacts
        uses: skx/github-action-build@master
      - name: Upload the artifacts
        uses: skx/github-action-publish-binaries@master
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        with:
          args: 'example-*'

This is the preferred approach because it uses a pair of distinct actions, each having one job:

• skx/github-action-build
  • Generates the build artifacts.
  • i.e. Compiles your binaries.
• skx/github-action-publish-binaries
  • Uploads the previously-generated the build artifacts.

GITHUB_TOKEN

Your workflow configuration file, named .github/workflows/release.yml, will contain a reference to secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN, however you do not need to generate that, or update your project settings in any way!

You can inject secrets into workflows, defining them in the project settings, and referring to them by name, but the GITHUB_TOKEN value is special and it is handled transparently, requiring no manual setup.