A GitHub Actions Rails CI Workflow in 5 lines

A few years ago, Matt Swanson wrote a great post on setting up Rails CI on GitHub Actions. It quickly became my go-to reference for setting up CI for new apps.

Over time, I made few updates and adjustments to it, so whenever I started a new project I would copy the config from one of my older projects. But this meant each project gradually became inconsistent, and some got updated more than others.

I wanted to have one single base workflow for all my apps, so that if I made a change, all the apps could easily benefit from it.

Reusable Workflows

In November 2021, GitHub announced that Reusable Workflows was generally available.

Although GitHub Actions has supported composite actions for a long time, Reusable Workflows allows for a much more concise configuration, and the ability to reference a whole workflow from another repository, rather than having to build up each step individually.

Read more about it on GitHub’s blog.

Introducing setup-rails

I’ve published setup-rails as a reusable workflow for quickly and easily enabling CI for Rails apps.

By creating a single file in your repo, e.g. .github/workflows/verify.yml, with the contents below, you should a have working CI workflow which configures the database and runs your app’s tests:

name: Verify
on: [push]

jobs:
  verify:
    uses: andyw8/setup-rails/.github/workflows/verify.yml@v1

You can take a look at this example app to see it in action.

The first time you run the workflow may be slow, but subsequent runs should be much faster once the dependencies are cached.

I’ve also shared a Railsbyte so that you can set this up with one command:

rails app:template LOCATION="https://railsbytes.com/script/VMys8A"

Principles and Configuration

I designed setup-rails so it should work at a basic level with no configuration needed for most apps.

There are a few options you can enable depending on your app, such as RuboCop, Bundler Audit and RSpec - see the README for details.

Currently only Postgres is supported but I’d like to expand to cover at least MySQL.

Enhancements

Building upon Matt’s great starting point, I made a few updates:

• Uses the latest versions of setup-node and setup-ruby
• Adds support for rails test (e.g. Minitest) as well as RSpec
• Enabled Dependabot for updates of the actions that setup-rails depends on
• Uses setup-node’s JavaScript caching rather than a custom approach
• Skips development gems when running Bundler to avoid unnecessary work.

Get Involved

I’m already using this on most of my apps, but I’d love to get wider feedback.

Please try setup-rails on your app and let me know how it works for you. Issues and pull requests are welcome!