Show example to release to another repo

[manongjohn]

I have an organization account with multiple repositories. The main repository builds artifacts and I'd like to take the artifact from the main builds and create a prerelease in another repo within the same organization account.

I was wondering if you could provide an example of how to set that up? I'm not exactly sure what I should be putting for repo and do I still need to create a personal access token or will the GITHUB_TOKEN still work since it's under the same organization?

Thanks

[manongjohn]

Nevermind. I did get it to work. Would be nice in your README to have an example showing all options.

At any rate, thank you for creating this action.

[nerdCopter]

@manongjohn , might you share how you succeeded? even after some hints, i'm failing:

Error: Error 422: Validation Failed: {"resource":"Release","code":"invalid","field":"target_commitish"}
Errors:
- The target_commitish field on Release is an invalid format.

[manongjohn]

Sure. Below is the step from my Linux workflow. The macOS & Windows are pretty much the same except the artifact.

My application is built in repo tahoma2d/tahoma2d when PRs are merged to my master. I have 3 workflows, 1 for each environment which creates a "nightly" version in tahoma2d/tahoma2d_nightlies. Whomever finishes first will create the release. The others will just update the release by adding the artifact, leaving name and body alone.

      - name: Create Nightlies Release
        if: ${{ github.event_name == 'push' && github.ref == 'refs/heads/master' }}
        uses: ncipollo/release-action@v1
        with:
          allowUpdates: true
          artifactErrorsFailBuild: false
          artifacts: toonz/build/Tahoma2D-linux-${{ matrix.compiler }}.tar.gz
          artifactContentType: "raw"
          body: ${{ github.event.head_commit.message }}
          name: ${{ env.NIGHTLYDATETIME }}
          omitBodyDuringUpdate: true
          omitNameDuringUpdate: true
          owner: tahoma2d	  
          prerelease: true
          replacesArtifacts: true
          repo: tahoma2d_nightlies
          tag: nightly-${{ github.sha }}
          token: ${{ secrets.TAHOMA2D_TOKEN }}

Hope that helps

[nerdCopter]

Thank you so very much!, i was so close :)
i think my fail was due to a few couple misconceptions.

adding

allowUpdates: true
artifactContentType: "raw"

as well as removing commit: parameter has solved my failure. i appreciate your prompt assistance!

[manongjohn]

@ncipollo I was wondering if you can provide what value should be set for the commit entry when creating a release in a different repo, or should this not be set for creating in a different repo? No matter what value I try to put in there (commit SHA, master,URLs to commit/branch, etc) it always fails the creation of the release.

Currently when creating the release in the other repo, it uses the other repo's master commit key. Ideally I would love the commit of the tag I create in the other repo commit key to point to the commit in the original repo. I found 1 repo that does this but not sure how to set that up when the tag is created.

[ncipollo]

You really should only be using the commit input if you are trying to use the action to create both the tag and the release at the same time (this is likely an uncommon use-case). What you probably want to be settings is the tag. That's what github will use to associate the release with.

commit ultimately translates to target_comitish of the API, you can read more about that here: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/repos#create-a-release

Not sure what specific error you are encountering, but if you aren't providing a tag the action is going to try and infer that from the gitref associated with the action run. Since it is running in a separate repo from the one you are attempting to create a release in I doubt the tag / git ref will exist there.

[manongjohn]

Yeah, I was looking at a lot of documentation on how to populate target_commitish but nothing I found helped to do what I was looking to do. Even putting master didn't seem to work

When I use the script mentioned above as is, it works. When I add commit: master just to test it, I am getting the following error:

Error: Error 422: Validation Failed: {"resource":"Release","code":"custom","field":"tag_name","message":"tag_name is not a valid tag"}, {"resource":"Release","code":"custom","message":"Published releases must have a valid tag"}, {"resource":"Release","code":"invalid","field":"target_commitish"}

As an example of what I am trying to do:
In this public repo opentoonz/opentoonz_nightly, the tags are created with a tag_name = nightly_SHA and somehow the commit = SHA from the original repo opentoonz/opentoonz. Clicking on the commit link, it does warn you that the commit doesn't belong to that repo, but still somehow shows the commit information from the original repo. I'm not sure how this was done.

[ncipollo]

Ah I see - yeah, I don't think that will work. The Github API needs a commit SHA from the repo you are creating a release in. When you are using the commit hash to create a tag, it performs that operation on that Github repo's underlying git repo, so it would have no knowledge of a commit in another repository.

It's also worth noting that the commit hash does nothing (or it's documented as doing nothing) if the tag already exists.

[manongjohn]

I guess I was reading that differently.

Anyway. thanks for your time. Appears to be my misunderstanding.

I'll have to talk to that repo owner to see how he manages to get the target_commitish to point to the original repo. If I find out, I'll update the discussion and maybe submit a feature request? :)

[manongjohn]

I know this is off topic, but since we were discussing it here, I just wanted to give a quick update on how to create a release in another repo with the commit hash from the source repo...

Essentially, you need to create a tag in the source repo, and force push it to the other repo you want to store it in. Then use release-action to create a release against it.

Here is what I did to get it to work in my repo's script. It runs before my Create Nightlies Release step above:

      - name: Create Nightlies Tag
        if: ${{ github.event_name == 'push' && github.ref == 'refs/heads/master' }}
        run: |
          git remote add nightly_repo https://tahoma2d:${{ secrets.TAHOMA2D_TOKEN }}@github.com/tahoma2d/tahoma2d_nightlies.git
          git config lfs.https://tahoma2d:${{ secrets.TAHOMA2D_TOKEN }}@github.com/tahoma2d/tahoma2d_nightlies.git.lfs.locksverify false
          git fetch --unshallow
          git tag -f nightly-${{ github.sha }}
          git config --unset-all http.https://github.com/.extraheader
          git push -f nightly_repo nightly-${{ github.sha }}
          git remote rm nightly_repo