New to CI/CD with no clue what these properties are for

[badihaki]

Hey, I'm really new the CI/CD and GitHub actions. I'm trying to run the workflow but there are properties I'm missing info for, and looking through the wiki there's no explanation on what they are. Can you explain what 'metadataConfig,' 'testDataConfig.' and 'artifactConfig' are for and how to configure them? Also, it there a way to set up the workflow to run on push? I saw it with GameCI's workflow but no idea how to implement it here.

[Avalin]

Hello!

For the first part:

The short answer is: use the ci-cd-dispatcher.yml instead of the ci-cd-pipeline.yml. It's mostly just intended to replace or add custom workflows if you need that.

The longer answer:
I understand your confusion, it's sort of a hacky approach to getting all the necessary parameters into the pipeline.
The ci-cd-dispatcher.yml workflow has this trigger_ci job:

And in the ci-cd-pipeline.yml we unpack these nested variables into these outputs:

The ci-cd-dispatcher.yml calls a workflow-dispatch on the ci-cd-pipeline.yml. Workflow dispatches have a limit to only 10 parameters set by GitHub. In order to circumvent it I used these nested values to get all parameters. In an ideal world, I would use workflow-call which (as far as I know) has unlimited parameters, but I was up against a 20-chained-workflows limit which is a hard limit for workflow calls also set by GitHub. (I am working on bringing that number down and reimplementing the regular, easier-to-understandable input variables for the ci-cd-pipeline.yml again.)

So to sum up, It is currently not intended to be dispatched directly using the ci-cd-pipeline.yml as the ci-cd-dispatcher.yml is responsible for filling out all these inputs, but I am working on making it more modular so that it can be used as well!

As for making it work with pushes:

Add branches: your-cicd-branch to the ci-cd-dispatcher, it can be a list of branches:

You can also make it all branches by using '**'

I added this to the wiki: https://github.com/Avalin/Unity-CI-Templates/wiki/Trigger-Architecture-&-Input-Config
I hope this answers your questions, otherwise feel free to reach out again!

[badihaki]

Hey, thanks for getting back to me! You've been an immense help, but I'm still having issues.

I thought I understood, so I tried setting it up like you mentioned, but the dispatcher workflow is still failing. I'm getting an error 128 (it could not read my username for GitHub).

Where exactly are these variables configured? Reading through the docs, I was able to
configure the project secrets and variables in settings->secrets and variables -> actions, so I've got my Unity-related secrets and my PAT listed under the correct names under secrets, and for variables I have build and deploy targets, the project name and unity version, and whether to exclude unity tests. I thought my username would be tied to my PAT, but I guess something went wrong here. Sorry to bother again, but I'm still lost...

[badihaki]

I have my build target set up in both my repository var and the config files. It's the same thing, but do you think that might be causing the issue?

[Avalin]

Woop, we found two issues!

Remove the trailing comma here in your repository variables and it will be valid JSON. :D

I see now you also wrote StandaloneWindow64 instead of StandaloneWindows64 (missing an s) in the inputs, so that will also default in an invalid target!

(I suggest you also double-check the config file to ensure it doesn't have similar typos)

[badihaki]

Aha, that worked to get me past that step! Everything works fine to a point, where it tries to build a StandaloneWindows64 version, but there's an error in that the scripting backend - IL2CPP - is not installed. It's installed on my local, and I can make a build fine when using Unity, but it's not being picked up by the workflow.

[Avalin]

I think that's because you're building Il2CPP for a Windows platform using an Ubuntu runner.
I suppose when you're building locally, you do it on a windows machine?
Try changing the runner from Ubuntu-latest to Windows-latest in the build-targets.json config:

  "StandaloneWindows64": {
    "os": "windows-latest",
    "minimumBuildType": "preview"
  }

(You might wanna increase the timeout-limit for builds depending on the size of your project, as Windows runners are quite a bit slower)

[Avalin]

It's been a couple days, so I hope it's okay I mark this resolved - otherwise feel free to open a new discussion if you have any other questions!