Setting up a Minicli app as a GitHub Action

Minicli applications can also be turned into GitHub Actions with proper containerization, as demonstrated in this DEV.to tutorial.

The process mainly involves:

1. creating a proper Dockerfile to run the application;
2. creating an action.yml file with metadata for your Action.

Both files must live in the root of your GitHub Action repository.

The Minicli Action Dockerfile

This is what a Dockerfile from a functional Minicli GitHub Action looks like:

FROM php:8.1-cli

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y \
    git \
    curl \
    libxml2-dev \
    zip \
    unzip

RUN apt-get clean && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*

# Install Composer and set up application
COPY --from=composer:latest /usr/bin/composer /usr/bin/composer
RUN mkdir /application
COPY . /application/
RUN cd /application && composer install

ENTRYPOINT [ "php", "/application/minicli" ]
CMD ["mycommand", "args"]

The action.yml file

This is what an action.yml for this action would look like:

name: 'Name of MyAction'
description: 'What the action does'
outputs:
  response:
    description: 'Output from command'
runs:
  using: 'docker'
  image: 'Dockerfile'

For more detailed information on how to create GitHub Actions with Minicli, check this tutorial on how to build a GitHub action to import posts from DEV.to.