Advanced GitHub actions features

Debugging GitHub action runs

GitHub actions can be tricky to debug when documentation fails to build, which is why cookiecutter dash docset includes mxschmitt/action-tmate.

The action will print out a command that allows you to ssh into the action environment so that you can debug failed runs.

How do I trigger a GitHub Actions workflow dispatch?

Go to the Actions section of your repository.

Select the Build docs workflow.

Select Run workflow.

Fill in the variables needed and click Run workflow to launch the new run. If we want to launch the tmate debugging session— we can fill in true under Run the build with tmate debugging enabled.

By default, a debugging session will run if Build docs is triggered on a workflow dispatch, Run the build with tmate debugging enabled is set to true, and a failure occurs in the actions steps.

Manually triggering a documentation build

A new version release of the documentation's library signals to this project that the docset is new and should be contributed to Kapeli/Dash-User-Contributions. You can also trigger this event manually. Similarly to Debugging GitHub action runs, launching an action via workflow dispatch with Manually trigger doc build and release. set to true will force the contribution steps to run regardless of whether the library version has changed.

This is useful for when you initially create your repository and want to immediately contribute a new docset without having to wait for a new release.