Docker services in Github Actions won't have secrets for you

I explain deeper how is structured an action and how to use docker services in an article but I will focus here more on services.

Yeah, the great fact is you can use Docker containers as services in Github Actions. 🎉

How do we do it?

Very simple, it is similar to the definition of a service in a docker-compose.yml but with far fewer parameters.

We use the keyword services with:

• the definition of the Docker image to be used
• the list of ports to be exposed of the service
• a list of environment variables
• a list of volumes

Not all of these elements are required but good to know.

In concrete terms, it looks like this, for a Postgres service:

services:
 image: postgres
  env:
  - POSTGRES_USER: postgres
  - POSTGRES_PASSWORD: postgres
  - POSTGRES_BD: postgres
  ports:
  - 5432/tcp
  options: --health-cmd pg_isready --health-interval 10s --health-timeout 5s --health-retries 5

Example made by Chris Patterson and Mike Coutermarsh for PostgreSQL. You can find the full example with node just here.

We need the Docker image to launch, the port to expose and the name of the service. There is a way to transmit environment values or Docker options as shown in the example above. Sensitive values can be defined with secret key.

Full example

For example we want to do an action which launch tests of our Django application on each push event.

The following workflow is implemented:

name: Test Workflow

on: push 

jobs:
 tests:
   runs-on: ubuntu-latest

   services:
    image: postgres
    env:
    - POSTGRES_USER: postgres
    - POSTGRES_PASSWORD: postgres
    - POSTGRES_BD: postgres
    ports:
    - 5432:5432
    options: --health-cmd pg_isready --health-interval 10s --health-timeout 5s --health-retries 5

   steps:
   - uses: actions/checkout@v1
   - name: Set up Python 3.5.7
   - uses: actions/setup-python@v1
     with:
      python-version: 3.5.7
   - name: Install dependencies
     run: pip install -r requirements.txt
   - name: Run tests
     run: python manage.py test

Here the job tests consist of:

• install Python 3.5.7 on the Ubuntu environment
• install the dependencies
• start the tests with the Postgres database

In this example, we still need to override the service values in the Django settings.py for the connection to the PostgreSQL database like that :

DATABASES = {
    'default': {
       'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.postgresql',
       'NAME': 'postgres',
       'USER': 'postgres',
       'HOST': 'localhost',
       'PORT': 5432,
    }
}

If you have multiple settings for database, you can do with env variable os.environ.get('HOST_NAME') or a conditional settings with if os.environ.get('GITHUB_WORKFLOW') for example.

Few notes

It is sometimes necessary to require a service status feedback to establish a connection. Therefore, an element is defined that checks the health of the service to know when it is operational (also called a health check).

options: --health-cmd pg_isready --health-interval 10s --health-timeout 5s --health-retries 5

This one is for postgres but you can find multiple such as elasticsearch, mysql and so on...
In case you don’t have a health check available, we pause the process execution with the command sleep, yes it’s not great, I grant you…

To link the service with the job of the workflow, the host is needed.
In case you're running your workflow :

• in the virtual machine, it will be localhost
• in a container, it will be the name of the service

Don't forget, you can use Docker services only with a Linux distribution.

According to the port, to access it on your job(s), it will be like that:

${{ job.services.postgres.ports[5432] }}

In the first example, the machine port 5432 is randomly assigned a free port and accessed.

Nevertheless, it can be assigned in a fixed way:

ports:
 - 5432:5432

Here, we have the port 5432 of the service related to the port 5432 of the machine defined in the action.

Here you go, you're ready to use services in your workflow ! 💪