First draft

Using Podman with GitHub Actions to run Fedora Linux

Introduction

GitHub enables distributed and collaborative
code development. To ensure software works correctly, many projects
use continuous integration to build and test each new contribution
before including it. The testing also ensures that changes in
external dependencies due to updates also allow the software to
run correctly.

Background

GitHub offers testing on Ubuntu, Mac OS X and Windows operating
systems. However, there is a wide variety of other operating systems.
One way to test software on some of these other operating systems is
to use containers, in particular podman. These
will run a guest operating system ontop of another host operating
system. The article
Getting Started with Podman in Fedora
introduces how to run podman on Fedora. Here, we will run podman
on Ubuntu as the host operating system with Fedora as the guest
operating system. This will allow us to test that our projects work
successfully on Fedora even if Fedora is not available as a base
operating system.

Working Example

As an example, we add continuous integration for Fedora linux to
RedAmber,
a project enabling the use of dataframes in
Ruby. This project relies on
Apache Arrow release 10 or greater,
so we need to use Fedora Rawhide as the Fedora 37 currently has
Apache Arrow release 9.

GitHub has great documentation on using
GitHub Actions.
In summary, we need to create a yaml file in the
+.github/workflows+ directory of our project, and then enable
GitHub Actions. A sample yaml file is below

...

Name of the workflow

name: CI

When the workflow should run

on:
push:
branches:
- main
pull_request:

What the workflow should do

jobs:
test:
name: fedora
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
# Steps of the workflow
steps:
# Install Podman on latest Ubuntu LTS
# then pull fedora rawhide image
- name: Setup Podman
run: |
sudo apt update
sudo apt-get -y install podman
podman pull fedora:38
# Clone the commit associated with push/pull request
- name: Get source
uses: actions/checkout@v3
with:
path: 'red_amber'
# Build a container then use podman to run it
- name: Create container and run tests
run: |
echo 'FROM fedora:38' >> podmanfile
# set timezone so that timestamp test works
echo 'ENV TZ=Asia/Tokyo' >> podmanfile
# Update and install Fedora dependencies
echo 'RUN dnf -y update' >> podmanfile
echo 'RUN dnf -y install gcc-c++ git libarrow-devel' >> podmanfile
echo 'RUN dnf -y install libarrow-glib-devel ruby-devel' >> podmanfile
echo 'RUN dnf clean all' >> podmanfile
echo 'COPY red_amber red_amber' >> podmanfile
echo 'WORKDIR /red_amber' >> podmanfile
# Install Ruby packages
echo 'RUN bundle install' >> podmanfile
echo 'RUN bundle exec rake test' >> podmanfile
# Build the container using the directions in the podmanfile
podman build --tag fedora38test -f ./podmanfile
...

Adding the above yaml file enables testing on Fedora linux. Similar workflows
should work for other projects, thereby ensuring a wide variety of software
will run well on Fedora linux.

Acknowledgements

Benson Muite is grateful to Hirokazu SUZUKI for creating RedAmber
and improving the workflow to include Fedora linux.