A treasure hunt for ruby in the beta of GitHub actions and workflows leaves me scratching my head…

GitHub recently opened up the workflows/actions to a public beta, and I’m in it.

Aside: A workflow is the .github/workflows/*.yml file that contains the actual workflow, while an action is more nebulous (Docker stuff, repos, etc.). This naming overlap makes it difficult to talk about, so I’ll stick to workflow.

I went through all my repos and decided to setup CI workflows for each one. I may add other things later, like stale-issue-organizers or deployment workflows, but I wanted to start simple.

And then I did my Dotfiles.

Results

For the interested, it ended up being a great way to check the compatibility of my dotfiles across Mac and Ubuntu. I ended up finding and fixing several bugs, and I’m glad I have this now.

However, there was one big hiccup, and I’ve documented it for you in all it’s glory: ruby, where are you?.

Needing Ruby

I need ruby because I need to run some downloaded ruby code to install brew as part of the make install process of my dotfiles:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$( curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install )"
/bin/sh: 1: /usr/bin/ruby: not found
Makefile:56: recipe for target 'brew_install' failed
make: *** [brew_install] Error 127

But as you can see, ruby is nowhere to be found.

Aside: There are other issues with that line of code; namely, we need LinuxBrew on Ubuntu instead of Homebrew, and not all rubies are /usr/bin/ruby. These have since been corrected.

It exists…

I was baffled. Ruby is provided in all the environments!

Treasure Hunt

Flummoxed, I spent hours crafting commits to find a ruby executable. I was largely unsuccessful, and eventually filed a GitHub support request.

Aside: I’ve done one of those before, but it seemed like they had a whole forum system, and now it’s just a little email. I can’t find any kind of forum, and I have no response from them at this time (beyond confirmation of receipt). If anyone knows what happened to the forums or where they are, please comment below.

Here’s some logs for you: a gist.

Then, I discovered this little gem. It’s still not quite perfect, but somehow in reading all of the documentation it was never mentioned that common environments (node, python, ruby) need setup actions.

So, when you need ruby for a GitHub workflow:

- uses: actions/setup-ruby@v1
  with:
    ruby-version: 2.6.x

Categories: Blog