How to set and access an environment variable in GitHub Actions?

Question

I am in the process of automating my react-native Expo release-cycle. I am using release channels in Expo to build staging and production builds. For example, on every push to staging-v1 GitHub branch, the action below is triggered.

//staging.yaml

name: Release to staging
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - staging*
jobs:
  publish:
    name: Install and publish on staging channel
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v1
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 12.x
      - uses: expo/expo-github-action@v5
        with:
          expo-version: 3.x
          expo-username: ${{ secrets.EXPO_CLI_USERNAME }}
          expo-password: ${{ secrets.EXPO_CLI_PASSWORD }}
          expo-packager: npm
      - run: npm install
      - run: expo publish --release-channel ${{ GITHUB_REF }}

{{ GITHUB_REF }} holds the current branch name. So when I push my changes to staging-v1 this action runs. However, I am getting this error.

I've tried setting env variables, it did not work also. I just want to append my branch_name to the expo publish command. Ultimately, when building, the run command should look like this.

 - run: npm install
 - run: expo publish --release-channel staging-v1

Any insight into this problem will be greatly appreciated. Thanks :)

Answer 1

I built a GitHub Action for this: FranzDiebold/github-env-vars-action

The usage is as follows:

steps:
  - uses: FranzDiebold/[email protected]
  - name: Print environment variables
    run: |
      echo "GITHUB_REPOSITORY_SLUG=$GITHUB_REPOSITORY_SLUG"
      echo "GITHUB_REPOSITORY_OWNER=$GITHUB_REPOSITORY_OWNER"
      echo "GITHUB_REPOSITORY_OWNER_SLUG=$GITHUB_REPOSITORY_OWNER_SLUG"
      echo "GITHUB_REPOSITORY_NAME=$GITHUB_REPOSITORY_NAME"
      echo "GITHUB_REPOSITORY_NAME_SLUG=$GITHUB_REPOSITORY_NAME_SLUG"
      echo "GITHUB_REF_SLUG=$GITHUB_REF_SLUG"
      echo "GITHUB_REF_NAME=$GITHUB_REF_NAME"
      echo "GITHUB_REF_NAME_SLUG=$GITHUB_REF_NAME_SLUG"
      echo "GITHUB_SHA_SHORT=$GITHUB_SHA_SHORT"

An example output is:

GITHUB_REPOSITORY_SLUG=ajinkabeer-test-repo
GITHUB_REPOSITORY_OWNER=ajinkabeer
GITHUB_REPOSITORY_OWNER_SLUG=ajinkabeer
GITHUB_REPOSITORY_NAME=test-repo
GITHUB_REPOSITORY_NAME_SLUG=test-repo
GITHUB_REF_SLUG=refs-heads-staging-v1
GITHUB_REF_NAME=staging-v1
GITHUB_REF_NAME_SLUG=staging-v1
GITHUB_SHA_SHORT=e2e4f0ab

A demo for all Operating systems (Linux, macOS and Windows) is also available in the demo workflows file of the repository!

Answer 2

After a lot of trial and error, I've found the solution. I used the github-slug-action workflow to access my branch_name.

name: Release to staging
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - staging*
jobs:
  publish:
    name: Install and publish on staging channel
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v1
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 12.x
      - uses: expo/expo-github-action@v5
        with:
          expo-version: 3.x
          expo-username: ${{ secrets.EXPO_CLI_USERNAME }}
          expo-password: ${{ secrets.EXPO_CLI_PASSWORD }}
          expo-packager: npm
      - run: npm install
      - name: Run tests
        run: |
          npm test
      - uses: rlespinasse/[email protected]
      - run: expo publish --release-channel=${{ env.GITHUB_REF_SLUG }}

Here is the log.