Bundling NPM modules for use in GitHub Actions

Posted on: Feb 23, 2020

When working with GitHub Actions if you want to expose some code as an action where you can just use it without needing to dive into the internals, there is two scenarios of either running it inside a docker container or bundling the code down. I'll be looking at the latter here.

Example

Say we have an action that uses Moment.js and prints out the current date. In a normal environment we would install the module

npm i moment

and write our code

const moment = require("moment");

const currentDate = moment();

console.log(currentDate.format("MMM Do YYYY"));

If we ran this on our local machine it would work, but in the case of on GitHub Actions, we should add an action.yml to describe the action:

name: "Print Current Date action"
description: "Prints the current date with Moment.js"
author: "Benjamin Lannon <>"
runs:
  using: node12
  main: index.js

So now if we use this action in a workflow:

on: push
name: "Print current time"
jobs:
  main:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - uses: lannonbr/print-current-date@master

It would fail as we haven't installed any node modules, and more importantly, having it in an action abstracts the code and you shouldn't need to understand all of the internals. The action gives a contract either through the name or a readme of the project that it does a certain task. One can dive in and see how it does such, but it's not a requirement if the code was properly coded and tested to do what it says it does.

To be able to fix this, you can bundle the JS with something like Webpack.

Webpack Config

First install webpack:

npm i -D webpack webpack-cli

and then create a webpack config file:

const path = require("path");

module.exports = {
  mode: "production",
  entry: "./index.js",
  output: {
    path: path.resolve(__dirname, "dist"),
    filename: "index.js",
  },
  target: "node",
  node: false,
};

Then if you run webpack, the file will be created at dist/index.js. It's a much larger file as it contains any of the 3rd party node modules it imports in, but now it is all self contained.

Modifying the action.yml file so the runs.main field points to dist/index.js will now make the action function as expected.