Team Ananas makes a github action

dmrp — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 06:56:22 +0000

So autumn Solidify kickoff came along, and we decided to do the Github actions challenge. Still under the influence of our vacations we decided we don't intend to be useful and came with the idea to simulate a game of life during your build.

The original idea was to have a parallel job that would print the game of life in your workflow run console so you can watch it while your workflow is running.

But it turned out that we cant render each generation in place of the old one, but only sequentially. Obvious in retrospective, you are not looking at a terminal, you are looking at the logs.

So we had to settle to just generate an animation of game of life that you could put as badge in your readme, seeded with the triggering git commit hash.

Challenges

Rendering images and gifs was made easy with great open source contributions but there was a problem: most ways to do that include getting canvas in node, and most ways to do that include system dependent binaries.

Actions are taken as is from your repository, so there is little opportunity to do platform specific packaging to get different binaries for possible runner hosts.

So special shout-out to joshmarinacci/node-pureimage for platform independent node canvas API. Just enough for our needs :)

Gif generation was effortless with:
https://github.com/eugeneware/png-file-stream
https://github.com/eugeneware/gifencoder

Many thanks Eugene!

And the root of our action, the game of life, was, of course, already done. Quite well in fact. Thank you @monarchwadia

Action is in the marketplace if you wish to decorate your repo with game of life badges:
https://github.com/marketplace/actions/game-of-life-build-badge

Generate a unique game of life badge for a workflow run

dmrp — Fri, 18 Sep 2020 06:22:14 +0000

My Workflow

The action takes a commit hash of the commit that triggered the workflow run and seeds with it the game of life. The game run is saved as gif the the location of your choosing and can be used in, e.g., Readme file as a unique badge for the build.

An example of the output:

Submission Category:

Wacky Wildcards

Yaml File or Link to Code

solidify / github-action-game-of-life

Game of Life Action

Uses commit hash to seed a game of life and generates a unique gif stamp for your workflow run.

Parameters

All parameters are optional.

gol-path - output path for the generated game of life gif
rows - number of rows in the world
columns - number of columns in the world
generations - how many generations will be played

Example result from the last action workflow run:

View on GitHub

Additional Resources / Info

Many thanks to
https://github.com/monarchwadia/conways-game-engine
https://github.com/joshmarinacci/node-pureimage
https://github.com/eugeneware/png-file-stream
https://github.com/eugeneware/gifencoder

For making this rather straightforward :)

by Team Ananas:
Kristoffer Karlsson
Tobias Larsson
Damir Petrac
Per Sundqvist

Forem: dmrp