actions / actions/toolkit

Promote problem matcher documentation to docs.github.com

Open
#2,105 1 comment 4 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
5.9k
Forks
1.8k
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

I was quite baffled by how many linters seemed to be dropping support for specific GitHub output styles. After some research, I discovered problem matchers. I don't think I should have had to stray from docs.github.com to learn that annotations can be formed from something besides workflow commands, like echo "::error file=app.js,line=1::Missing semicolon".

While the docs do briefly mention actions/toolkit, it is only in the context of writing a custom action in JavaScript. But that's not what I'm trying to do. I'm just running something like run: eslint … in a workflow file, and didn't have a sensible way to connect that after doing setup-node that eslint --format stylish would be matched by an implicit problem matcher.

If there's some way to make this clear to folks reading https://docs.github.com/en/actions/reference/workflows-and-actions/expressions, thank you. If not, maybe someone like me will save time by stumbling across this issue.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reading docs/problem-matchers.md and the linked docs.github.com workflow-commands page. Compare their coverage of problem matchers and annotations for run steps such as eslint; done means the relevant docs.github.com content clearly explains how these outputs are matched and where to learn more.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
github-actions
Domain
documentation
Issue type
Documentation
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.