Publishing on GitHub Market Place

Summary

To publish out pactflow/actions repo on the GitHub Actions Marketplace

Background

The GitHub Marketplace would significantly increase the discoverability of our action. It would also help give confidence to end users by using an official action as opposed to one of the ones that already exist from third parties.

Complication

This repo contains a number of actions which have to be accessed by specifying the path:

- uses: pactflow/actions/can-i-deploy@v2
  with:
    application_name: my-consumer-app
    broker_url: ${{ secrets.PACT_BROKER_BASE_URL }}
    token: ${{ secrets.PACT_BROKER_TOKEN }}
    version: "1.0.1"

Unfortunately, these sub-actions cannot be published to the market place as-is.

To get around this, I would suggest we create a single 'front' that then dispatches the correct sub-action. For example, to call the can-i-deploy action above, I envisage the following:

- uses: pactflow/actions@v2
  with:
    action: can-i-deploy   # <- this determine which sub-action to invoke
    application_name: my-consumer-app
    broker_url: ${{ secrets.PACT_BROKER_BASE_URL }}
    token: ${{ secrets.PACT_BROKER_TOKEN }}
    version: "1.0.1"

The main downside of this is that the parameters for this 'front' will have to consist of the union of all parameters for all sub-actions. This will have a slight negative impact within IDEs as the completions won't be as nice; however, most actions share a number of common parameters so the union of all parameters should not be too bad hopefully.

Start by inventorying the existing sub-actions and their parameters, using the can-i-deploy example as the reference entry point. Compare their inputs with the proposed pactflow/actions front action, then verify what GitHub Marketplace publication requires; done means the single front action can dispatch the sub-actions and the repository is publishable there.