Github Actions: check steps status

Maxim picture Maxim · Sep 9, 2019 · Viewed 7.9k times · Source

I have in my job for CI some steps which can throw an error. I don't want restart workflow on every step with error and want to go to the last step that checks those steps and complete this job as fail. But I can't get status info previously steps.

name: CI
on: [pull_request]
jobs:
  myjob:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Step 1
        id: hello
        run: <any> 
        continue-on-error: true
      - name: Step 2
        id: world
        run: <any> 
        continue-on-error: true
      - name: Check on failures
        if: job.steps.hello.status == failure() || job.steps.world.status == failure()
        run: exit 1

When I use next constructions in "if" or "run" then will get: steps -> {}, job.steps -> null.

How can I get status information?

Answer

peterevans picture peterevans · Sep 19, 2019

Update: The steps context now contains detail about the execution of each step by default. Using the outcome property of each step we can check the result of its execution.

name: CI
on: [pull_request]
jobs:
  myjob:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Step 1
        id: hello
        run: <any> 
        continue-on-error: true
      - name: Step 2
        id: world
        run: <any> 
        continue-on-error: true
      - name: Check on failures
        if: steps.hello.outcome != 'success' || steps.world.outcome != 'success'
        run: exit 1

Original answer Looking at the documentation for the steps context, it doesn't look like it contains any information about the step other than outputs. These must be explicitly defined by steps. That is why the steps context is empty {}.

https://help.github.com/en/articles/contexts-and-expression-syntax-for-github-actions#steps-context

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there is no default status for a step that can be accessed. The solution involves manually defining a status output variable from each step.

name: CI
on: [pull_request]
jobs:
  myjob:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Step 1
        id: hello
        run: echo ::set-output name=status::failure
        continue-on-error: true
      - name: Step 2
        id: world
        run: echo ::set-output name=status::success
        continue-on-error: true
      - name: Dump steps context
        env:
          STEPS_CONTEXT: ${{ toJson(steps) }}
        run: echo "$STEPS_CONTEXT"
      - name: Check on failures
        if: steps.hello.outputs.status == 'failure' || steps.world.outputs.status == 'failure'
        run: exit 1

This creates the following context output and the job fails.

{
  "hello": {
    "outputs": {
      "status": "failure"
    }
  },
  "world": {
     "outputs": {
      "status": "success"
    }
  }
}

https://help.github.com/en/articles/metadata-syntax-for-github-actions#outputs https://help.github.com/en/articles/development-tools-for-github-actions#set-an-output-parameter-set-output