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by explorigin 1539 days ago
From my perspectives, GHA is missing 2 things over CircleCI. A way to pause an action for approval, or a way to pull artifacts from other workflows. Both of these actions are _possible_ with an external service but painful to setup. I want to: create a terraform plan, approve it, and then deploy the specifically approved plan. That's not so difficult in CircleCI but is _painful_ in GHA.
1 comments
zhfliz 1538 days ago
fwiw, you can use approvals using environments: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/deployment/targeting-diff...
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explorigin 1538 days ago
Sure, but that's actually worse than useless for my use-case. Image this, you have an action that publishes your plan to your PR (#1 - it's a biggish feature). It gets merged and goes to approval. Then people happen. PR #2 is addressing a customer-facing bug so it gets fast-tracked and rammed through before PR #1. Suddenly PR #1 is silently invalid. It _should_ be rejected at this point but the whole point of CI/CD is to save time and reduce the surface area for human mistakes.
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zhfliz 1538 days ago
specifically for your terraform example, wouldn't it make more sense to have the PR merged only when apply was successful?

i'm not sure how well that can be represented in GH actions, but that would surely be the better option?

you'll always risk some kind of race condition there, e.g. atlantis locks the project while something is planned but not applied to avoid such things from happening. this of course prevents having multiple PRs "ready" at the same time, you'd have to unlock the active PR lock to be able to implement another one.

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explorigin 1538 days ago
This still can't use GHA to enforce any sort of integrity so it's kinda moot. I have some of my projects set up to deploy with CircleCI...which can give me the build, approve, apply (specifically the thing you approved) chain that I'm looking for (so there's no race condition). "Why not use CircleCI?" well i do, but if my company decides to cut costs, it may not survive the chopping block...so I'm looking at other options.
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thaeli 1537 days ago
Just looked at CircleCI recently. Great product, but the price difference between them and GHA was absolutely jaw dropping.
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