Service Containers can be defined in Composite Action but don't initialise

Describe the bug When a service block is defined in a composite action, the containers do not initialise although no syntax errors are thrown.

Either it is not possible for this to work, so there should be an error not allowing e to include service block in composite action; or it is possible but isn’t working as expected.

To Reproduce

Composite Action Definition: (./.github/actions/example/action.yml)

name: "Run RSpec Tests"

inputs:
  spec:
    required: true

services:
  postgres:
    image: postgres:13.3
    env:
      POSTGRES_USER: example
      POSTGRES_DB: example
      POSTGRES_PASSWORD: "example"
    ports: ["5432:5432"]
    options: --health-cmd pg_isready --health-interval 10s --health-timeout 5s --health-retries 5
  
  redis:
    image: redis 
    ports:
      - 6379:6379
    options: >-
      --health-cmd "redis-cli ping"
      --health-interval 10s
      --health-timeout 5s
      --health-retries 5
      
runs:
  using: "composite"

  steps:
    - name: Checkout repo
      uses: actions/checkout@v2

    - name: Restore Ruby Cache
      uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
      with:
        ruby-version: 2.7.4 
        bundler-cache: true 

    - name: Setup DB 
      run: bundle exec rake db:setup 
      shell: bash

    - name: RSpec Tests
      run: bundle exec rake spec:${{ inputs.spec }}
      shell: bash

And to call it in your main workflow yml:

jobs:
  setup_and_lint:
    name: Setup Ruby and Linting
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - name: Checkout repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v2
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - name: Setup Ruby
        uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
        with:
          ruby-version: 2.7.4 
          bundler-cache: true 
      - name: Linting 
        if: ${{ github.event_name == 'pull_request' }}
        uses: HeRoMo/pronto-action@v1.27.0

  rspec_tests_example1:
    name: RSpec Tests (example1)
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    needs: setup_and_lint
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: RSpec Tests
        uses: ./.github/actions/rspec_test
        with:
          spec: example1

And the example1 block could be replicated for many Specs.

Expected behavior

Either:

• RSpec Tests jobs should run in parallel as normal, and when they execute, initialise the service containers specified in the composite action

OR,

• If this is not possible (I realise that I’m calling the action at the Step level but Services are defined at Job level, so perhaps it’s not intended to work) then the syntax of the Composite action should throw an error to show that this is the case.

If that is the case, then it would be great to find another way of resuing Service definitions to save duplicated code.

Runner Version and Platform

ubuntu-latest

What’s not working?

• The automated “Initialise Containers” step simply does not run
• Because the containers aren’t created, the spec jobs fail due to nothing running on the defined ports.

Job Log Output

[pattwell]

@y-nk A very good point and useful addition to this thread, thank you!

I did actually try using exactly that matrix approach and while it did work, unfortunately as we have quite a lot of tests (9 specs) the whole the workflow ran extremely slowly (took about double the time in total) as I think by default they share a runner, or perhaps the service containers became a bottleneck.

Potentially worth revisiting though as it has been a while and I might be wrong on that, or we might be able to enforce runner segregation creatively to make it work more smoothly.

[y-nk]

@pattwell if that can help, i’m currently solving this issue by abusing the matrix feature. you can define one generic job with specific data in the matrix like this:

rspec_tests_example:
    name: RSpec Tests
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    needs: setup_and_lint

    matrix:
      specs:
        - example1
        - example2

    services:
      postgres:
        image: postgres:13.3
        env:
          POSTGRES_USER: example
          POSTGRES_DB: example
          POSTGRES_PASSWORD: "example"
        ports: ["5432:5432"]
        options: --health-cmd pg_isready --health-interval 10s --health-timeout 5s --health-retries 5
  
      redis:
        image: redis 
        ports:
          - 6379:6379
        options: >-
          --health-cmd "redis-cli ping"
          --health-interval 10s
          --health-timeout 5s
          --health-retries 5

    steps:
      - name: Checkout repo
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      - name: Restore Ruby Cache
        uses: ruby/setup-ruby@v1
        with:
          ruby-version: 2.7.4 
          bundler-cache: true 

      - name: Setup DB 
        run: bundle exec rake db:setup 
        shell: bash

      - name: RSpec Tests
        run: bundle exec rake spec:${{ matrix.spec }}
        shell: bash

there will be limitations to that but for the usecase i’m having (which seems similar to yours) it works just ok.

thank you for the great amount of reporting you did (here and in github community with the follow-ups etc)