📝 Docs: Scope of application? (Suitable for GitHub Actions?)

[johnnyreilly]

Heya!

Just a random question I wanted to ask to clarify when it's appropriate to use CTA and when it isn't. I'm writing a GitHub Action for the first time and, going by the docs, it's advised to use this template:

https://github.com/actions/typescript-action

But it got me to thinking; is there a time when you might use CTA instead for GitHub Action creation? Or is that a bit specialised? My guess is that it is a bit specialised, given all the publishing mechanism etc. but I thought I'd check.

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

Good question! For specifically GHAs I do use CTA and think it's appropriate: https://github.com/JoshuaKGoldberg/all-contributors-auto-action, https://github.com/JoshuaKGoldberg/release-it-action. It's not ideal given that there's no way yet to sync changes to a repo that's customized (#498) - but IME most repo's I've used with CTA need some customization. So that's not much worse than many others.

This is a good question in general too. Assigning to myself and marking as accepting PRs for an entry to be added to https://github.com/JoshuaKGoldberg/create-typescript-app/blob/main/docs/FAQs.md. I'll try to find some nice wordcrafting to explain the situation a bit there. Thanks!

[johnnyreilly]

Interesting! I may experiment then - will report back if I've any significant findings. Unrelated, but I'm also experimenting with using Bun for development of my GHA even though it'll use node at runtime (saves me setting up ts-node; not sure how advantageous it actually is)

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

Following up: I think this was resolved by the combo of:

• 📝 Documentation: Long-term project vision #1181: in that I'm separately planning on making things much more swappable
• docs: how to create a GitHub Action #1196: docs specifically for GHA

Once this is fully migrated to create, I'll file issues for providing first-party blocks for GHA builds and other not-on-by-default things. 👍