New environment file issues with Outputs and fromJson

Describe the bug Getting deprecated “set-output” command warning, so I decided to update the notation to use github environment files, but started getting these errors in both self-hosted and GitHub-hosted servers:

Error when evaluating 'strategy' for job 'Test_Second_Job'. .github/workflows/github-actions-demo.yml (Line: 28, Col: 21): Error parsing fromJson,.github/workflows/github-actions-demo.yml (Line: 28, Col: 21): Error reading JToken from JsonReader. Path '', line 0, position 0.,.github/workflows/github-actions-demo.yml (Line: 28, Col: 21): Unexpected type of value '', expected type: Sequence.

I made changes according to the following link: https://github.blog/changelog/2022-10-11-github-actions-deprecating-save-state-and-set-output-commands/

I created a very basic version of the workflow yaml file to try and pinpoint the issue as in the below link, but even that is giving the same errors: https://github.com/TheOnlyWei/github_actions_test/blob/env-filetest/.github/workflows/github-actions-demo.yml https://github.com/TheOnlyWei/github_actions_test/actions/runs/3398602911

name: GitHub Actions Demo
on: 
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - main
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  Test_First_Job:
    runs-on: windows-2019
    steps:
      - name: Convert input to JSON for matrix.
        id: matrix_json_step
        shell: pwsh
        run: |
          $jsonArrayString = "[`"test1:test2:test3`",`"test4:test5:test6`"]"
          echo "JSON_ARRAY=${jsonArrayString}" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT

    outputs:
      JSON_ARRAY: ${{ steps.matrix_json_step.outputs.JSON_ARRAY }}

  Test_Second_Job:
    runs-on: windows-2019
    needs: Test_First_Job
    strategy:
      fail-fast: false
      matrix:
        JSON_ARRAY: ${{ fromJson(needs.Test_First_Job.outputs.JSON_ARRAY) }}
    steps:
      - name: Print JSON_ARRAY
        shell: pwsh
        run: |
          Write-Host "JSON_ARRAY VALUE IN SECOND JOB: ${{ matrix.JSON_ARRAY }}"

Anyone know how to fix this error? According to official document, the above should work. The above code worked fine with old “set-output” format.

According to fromJson doc, the above should work? https://docs.github.com/en/actions/learn-github-actions/expressions#fromjson

To Reproduce See above.

Expected behavior Expected behavior is that using the new GitHub environment file should produce no errors like the deprecated “set-output” command, but there is an error.

Runner Version and Platform

Version of your runner? 2.298.2

OS of the machine running the runner? OSX/Windows/Linux/… Windows Server 2016 Datacenter

What’s not working?

See above.

Job Log Output

See above.

Runner and Worker’s Diagnostic Logs

Not applicable.

[NPGiorgi]

Same is happening to me, and the issue seems to be specific to fromJson + matrix. My process is:

• First job creates json, save it as output
• Second job grabs json from first job output, parses it and prints it (works fine, added for debugging porpuses)
• Third job uses the json from first job output to build a matrix strategy (get the same error stated above)

Error:

Error when evaluating 'strategy' for job 'build_job_name'. .github/workflows/workflow_name.yaml (Line: 118, Col: 15): Error parsing fromJson,.github/workflows/workflow_name.yaml (Line: 118, Col: 15): Error reading JToken from JsonReader. Path '', line 0, position 0.,.github/workflows/deploy_dev.yaml (Line: 118, Col: 15): Unexpected type of value '', expected type: Mapping.

Also I need to add this was working fine before, and it was broken when I came back to work on Monday. I’ve been trying to fix it since without luck.

[LinqLover]

For any googlers, I had a similar problem in bash because I used double quotes (") instead of single quotes (') when creating the output. In my case, I could fix the issue by changing

-          echo "my-array<<EOF
+          echo 'my-array<<EOF
           ${{ toJson(fromJson('["Trunk", "6.0"]')) }}
-          EOF" >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT
+          EOF' >> $GITHUB_OUTPUT

https://github.com/hpi-swa-lab/SqueakByExample-english/pull/137/commits/01707f0b56ac9eacc2bb003e6b354174434ceb07