2024/06/28

Running prebuilt Gauche on GitHub workflow

The setup-gauche action installs Gauche on GitHub workflow runners for you (Using Gauche in GitHub Actions). But it downloaded source tarball and compiled, which took time. Especially if your repo is a small library, it feels waste of time compiling Gauche every time you push to the repo.

Now, setup-gauche can use a prebuilt binary on ubuntu-latest and macos-latest platforms. Just give prebuilt-binary: true as the parameter:

name: Build and test

on: [push, pull_request]

jobs:
  build-and-test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    timeout-minutes: 10
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3
    - uses: practical-scheme/setup-gauche@v5
      with:
        prebuilt-binary: true
    - name: Install dependencies
      run: |
        sudo apt install -y gettext
    - name: Build and check
      run: |
        ./configure
        make
        make -s check

Installing prebuilt binary takes around 10s or so; huge time saving.

Note that the prebuilt binary is provided with the latest Gauche release only. Other parameters of setup-gauche are ignored if you use the prebuilt binary.

(You may have noticed that the repository name is now under practical-scheme instead of shirok--I made practical-scheme organization and am gradually moving Gauche repositories to there, for easier maintenance. The URL is redirected from shirok so you don't need to update immediately, but just FYI.)

The following is for those who are curious about behind-the-scene.

Prebuilt binaries are prepared in a different repository: https://github.com/practical-scheme/setup-gauche-binary

It has GitHub actions that fetches the latest release tarball, build in GitHub runner, and upload the result as the assets of the repo's release. That ensures the binary runs on GitHub runners.

Tags: github, CI