Glob patterns not working for me

[jchiatt]

Howdy!

I am working on a project in a monorepo. Each package is an individual static site generated by Eleventy, and we are deploying to CloudFlare Workers Sites.

All of the sites follow a very similar structure and have the same config, so I’m using hygen to be able to generate all the boilerplate for a new site easily. I’m also hoping to use this to generate a Workflow for each site’s staging and prod environments.

On each Pull Request, I want to build and deploy staging instances of whatever package(s) (sites) I was working on for that PR. Initially, I thought I could do this by pattern matching the branch name but I had issues getting the glob pattern to match. The idea being I could prepend any branch related to site-a with site-a like this: feat/site-a/add-the-thing.

Example:

on:
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - ' **site-a**'

^ does not work. 

But then I read about paths and thought that would fit my use case much better, especially since it detects files that have been modified inside the directories that match your glob patterns.

So I tried:

on:
  pull_request:
    paths:
    - ' **site-a**'

But to no avail. When I open a PR, it triggers, but it also seems to trigger even when_ no files were modified inside a path containing site-a._

Here’s the full config for site-a’s staging workflow right now:

name: Deploy Site A Homepage to Workers Staging
on:

pull_request:

paths:

- ' site-a'
jobs:

build:

runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
  - name: Checkout
    uses: actions/checkout@v2

  - name: Setup Node
    uses: actions/setup-node@v1
    with:
      node-version: "12.x"

  - name: Install Dependencies
    run: yarn install
    working-directory: ./packages/sites/regions/us-west/site-a/home

  - name: Build
    run: yarn build
    working-directory: ./packages/sites/regions/us-west/site-a/home

  - name: Deploy
    run: yarn run wrangler publish --env staging
    working-directory: ./packages/sites/regions/us-west/site-a/home

[jbeveland27]

Did you try this by chance? 

on:
  pull_request:
    branches:
    - ' **/site-a/**'

That pattern might match what you’re looking to accomplish if I’m not mistaken.

If that fails, maybe you could try using the if conditional at the job level (which is admittedly cumbersome if you have several jobs).

https://help.github.com/en/actions/reference/workflow-syntax-for-github-actions#jobsjob_idif

[jbeveland27]

Did you try this by chance? 

on:
  pull_request:
    branches:
    - ' **/site-a/**'

That pattern might match what you’re looking to accomplish if I’m not mistaken.

If that fails, maybe you could try using the if conditional at the job level (which is admittedly cumbersome if you have several jobs).

https://help.github.com/en/actions/reference/workflow-syntax-for-github-actions#jobsjob_idif

[jchiatt]

Update: I found this thread and am I understanding correctly that my paths pattern will indeed be matched against the entire branch history rather than just asking “what’s changed since the last push” ?

If so, that’s really unfortunate for my situation. 

[weide-zhou]

Hi @jchiatt ,

For ‘pull_request’ event, the default types are: opened, synchronize, and reopened. 

But to no avail. When I open a PR, it triggers, but it also seems to trigger even when_ no files were modified inside a path containing site-a._

_>> _If you triggered a workflow from PR but not close PR, edit a ‘not-site-a’ file,  the workflow will still be triggered since event type ‘synchronize’ is met, and ‘paths’ fiter check the whole PR  files including the previous ‘site-a’ file.

Hence, you can specify the type together with ‘paths’ to avoid this situation, code sample as below:

on:
  pull_request:
    types: opened
    paths:
      - ' **site-a**'

Hope it helps!

[jchiatt]

This makes sense to me now! Thanks for the help.