A few years back, I rejiggered the site to use GitHub Actions specifically so I could include media and binary files in the repo.

With the recent cube post, I finally got around to plugging in some pictures. Surprise surprise, the software I never actually tested was broken. Who could've seen that coming?

Two quick(ish) addenda to the hosting process.

Missing Media

On first push, all I saw was broken placeholders for the images. Okay, my MTGO screenshots aren't exactly Monet, but they should look better than that!

I popped open the console and confirmed from the network that we were downloading something, so the files were there in some fashion, but whatever that fashion was, it wasn't an image.

Git LFS basically replaces the media with file links in the repo. I had a hunch that we were trying to display these links, rather than following them home. Hm.

Turns out the checkout action does exactly that. By default, it won't actually pull in the files themselves:

# Whether to download Git-LFS files
# Default: false
lfs: ''

Simply setting that to true should do the trick, right?

Looking for LFS

Well, close. With that set, the job errored out:

Unable to locate executable file: git. Please verify either the file path exists or the file can be found within a directory specified by the PATH environment variable. Also check the file mode to verify the file is executable.

Thankfully, somebody else as clueless as me ran into the same issue. Straightforward enough; no git-lfs installed, no way to pull the media.

As I mentioned in the original blog, we're using the Clojure-enabled container clojure:lein so we can run the build. Presumably, this doesn't natively come with git-lfs installed.

There're a couple ways to skin this coding cat. I don't think we can set a container on a per-step basis, but we should be able to per-job. If we did that, we could pass the checked-out repo across jobs, e.g. as an artifact. That takes some tweaking and testing though and it's just about dinner time for me.

Instead, I took the blunt approach: I'm just installing git-lfs in the image and moving on:

- name: setup
  run: "apt-get update && apt-get -y install git-lfs"

This isn't the most elegant, but with that in place, the job can perform the LFS checkout. Suddenly, images appear!

So, two lessons: first, make sure the GitHub Actions actually work end-to-end. Second, hire a good QA!