Use GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS env var with GitHub Actions secret

Question

My problem is simple: I want to run code that depends on GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS being set up correctly from a GitHub Actions secret.

The problem is that GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS is expect to contain a path to a service account file, whether the secret contain the actual service account file content.

What's the best practice for that?

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EDIT

Essentially I run a NodeJS script which connect to multiple GCP resources using client libraries (PubSub, BigQuery, etc). To my understanding, they can most easily work if GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS env var is correctly defined.

Answer 1

You can use this GitHub action to log in. Pretty much you have to create a secret with the content of the service account and specified it as input:

    - id: 'auth'
      name: 'Authenticate to Google Cloud'
      uses: 'google-github-actions/auth@v0'
      with:
        credentials_json: '${{ secrets.GOOGLE_CREDENTIALS }}'