GitHub Actions step executed while it shouldn't, based on a conditional-CodePudding

I have the following steps' sequence in a GitHub Actions job (first one is used more or less for debugging purposes

env:
  FAIL_OUTCOME: 'fail'


      - name: debug
        shell: bash
        run: |
          echo "evaluation-1 result is ${{ steps.evaluation_1.outputs.evaluation-1-outcome }}
          echo "evaluation-2 result is ${{ steps.evaluation_2.outputs.evaluation-2-outcome }}
          echo $FAIL_OUTCOME

      - name: send slack failure
        if: ${{ steps.evaluation_1.outputs.evaluation-1-outcome }} == $FAIL_OUTCOME || ${{ steps.evaluation_2.outputs.evaluation-2-outcome }} == $FAIL_OUTCOME
        uses: rtCamp/action-slack-notify@v2
        env:
           ...


      - name: send slack success
        if: ${{ steps.evaluation_1.outputs.evaluation-1-outcome }} != $FAIL_OUTCOME && ${{ steps.evaluation_2.outputs.evaluation-2-outcome}} != $FAIL_OUTCOME
        uses: rtCamp/action-slack-notify@v2
        env:
          ...

Here is the outcome of the debug action:

  echo "evaluation-1 result is 
  echo "evaluation-2 result is fail

where it seems that first outcome is not set.

However, what puzzles me is that success action is also executed, i.e.

${{ steps.evaluation_1.outputs.evaluation-1-outcome }} != $FAIL_OUTCOME && ${{ steps.evaluation_2.outputs.evaluation-2-outcome}} != $FAIL_OUTCOME

becomes true. How is it possible?

To provide for more context, the outputs' assignment in previous steps are as follows:

echo "::set-output name=evaluation-2-outcome::$FAIL_OUTCOME"

CodePudding user response：

The straight answer to your question is that you are misusing the $FAIL_OUTCOME value in if statements.

There you need to use:

if: steps.evaluation_1.outputs.evaluation-1-outcome == env.FAIL_OUTCOME || steps.evaluation_2.outputs.evaluation-2-outcome == env.FAIL_OUTCOME
...
if: steps.evaluation_1.outputs.evaluation-1-outcome != env.FAIL_OUTCOME && steps.evaluation_2.outputs.evaluation-2-outcome != env.FAIL_OUTCOME

or:

if: ${{ steps.evaluation_1.outputs.evaluation-1-outcome == env.FAIL_OUTCOME || steps.evaluation_2.outputs.evaluation-2-outcome == env.FAIL_OUTCOME }}
...
if: ${{ steps.evaluation_1.outputs.evaluation-1-outcome != env.FAIL_OUTCOME && steps.evaluation_2.outputs.evaluation-2-outcome != env.FAIL_OUTCOME }}

Env variables can be accessed as $FAIL_OUTCOME only in bash scopes - everywhere else, you need to explicitly use env. prefix.

However, I would recommend doing it properly and not fighting with env variables combined with set-output madness - which has a lot of gotchas and it's hard to debug and maintain.

Slack success and failures can be easily handled by checking the output of the whole job:

 - name: send slack failure
   if: failure()

 - name: send slack success
   if: success()

If you want to communicate about failure of some steps only:

notify_failure:
    if: always() && !cancelled() && needs.check_failure_step.result != 'success'
    needs: check_failure_step

And instead of using echo set-output:: just exit 1 to fail a certain job. Combining that with needs and jobs output values and if: always() you can achieve anything you want.

It gives you also a huge advantage of seeing which job has failed straight on workflow run summary without looking to its "output" or "debug" logs.