Published Install azcopy v1 to GitHub Actions

Kohei Akiyama
3 min readJan 20, 2020

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Introduction

I started using GitHub Actions.

GitHub Actions (and Azure Pipelines) has the advantage that it can be defined in units of Action compared to like Travis CI.
I didn’t want to write scripts every time, so I decided to release the original Action.
This is install-azcopy-action.

In this article, I wouldn’t write about this Action.
See the link above and the GitHub repo for details.

How to make GitHub Actions

Please refer to the official polite documentation.

I implemented with “JavaScript action”.

The code itself is based on a template repository for writing in TypeScript, which is officially provided.

It was the first time I used the GitHub feature called Template.
Very convenient.

Impression

Release is very easy and good

We can release by simply checking the release function on the GitHub repository.
Even after release, we can easily unpublish by simply unchecking. (Of course it will affect if there is already a user)

Good or bad namespace

In this Action, specify it as -uses:kheiakiyama/install-azcopy-action@v1.
This is the username + the repository name of GitHub.

As a result, there is no competition for obtaining names such as npm and ruby gems, which is common in package management.
Instead, I was wondering whether to add “action” to the repository name.
From the point of view of the user writing yaml, “action” is unnecessary, but I want to be able to identify it as a personal repository.
I decided to use the writing side ego.

Category is difficult to select

When publishing, select a Category from the following screen.

As you can see from the Action search screen below, there is no good category that applies to an action that installs something.

GitHub Actions often installs some tools due to the nature of building workflows from almost vanilla environments such as Windows, Ubuntu, Mac, etc. However, I couldn’t find category should apply to it.
Eventually, I decided to choose “Utilities”.

I want a branding preview of action.yml

branding:
icon: ‘triangle’
color: ‘blue’

The appearance on the Marketplace is defined by metadata as described above.
Unfortunately, we have to release this to know as a image.
I’m glad if the preview appears instead of the content as shown below.

Conclusion

Since it is released as OSS, I want to manage it so that no problems occur.
Welcome bug reports and requests.

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Kohei Akiyama

Azure Solution Architect / especially focused PaaS,DevOps