Defang GitHub Action

This GitHub Action is the easiest way to deploy your application with Defang.

You can deploy to any of the following cloud providers

• your own AWS account
• your own GCP account
• the Defang Playground

Usage

The simplest usage is to deploy a Compose-based project to the Defang Playground. This is done by adding the following to your GitHub workflow, assuming you have a compose.yaml file in the root of your repository.

To do so, just add a job like the following to your GitHub workflow (note the permissions and the Deploy step):

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: read
      id-token: write

    steps:
    - name: Checkout Repo
      uses: actions/checkout@v4

    - name: Deploy
      uses: DefangLabs/defang-github-action@v1.3.2

Managing Config Values

Defang allows you to securely manage configuration values. You can store your config using GitHub Actions Secrets and then pass them through to the Defang action.

To publish a secret stored in GitHub to the cloud as a secure config value with defang, you need to do two things:

1. Use the env section of the step to pass the value of the secrets to environment variables that match the names of the config values in your Compose file.
2. Specify the names of the environment variables you want to push to the cloud as config values in the config-env-vars input, either whitespace delimited or as a YAML literal block scalar (|).

The second step is to make sure that we only publish the secrets you explicitly tell us to. For example, you could have a secret in an env var at the job level, instead of the step level that you might not want to push to the cloud, even if it is in a secure store.

jobs:
  test:
    # [...]
    steps:
      # [...]
    - name: Deploy
      uses: DefangLabs/defang-github-action@v1.3.2
      with:
        # Note: you need to tell Defang which env vars to push to the cloud as config values here. Only these ones will be pushed up.
        config-env-vars: |
          API_KEY
          DB_CONNECTION_STRING
      env:
        API_KEY: ${{ secrets.API_KEY }}
        DB_CONNECTION_STRING: ${{ secrets.DB_CONNECTION_STRING }}

Projects in a Subdirectory

If your Compose file is in a different directory than your project root, you can specify the path to the project in the cwd input.

jobs:
  test:
    # [...]
    steps:
      # [...]
    - name: Deploy
      uses: DefangLabs/defang-github-action@v1.3.2
      with:
        cwd: "./test"

Specifying the CLI Version

If you want to use a specific version of the Defang CLI, you can specify it using the cli-version input. Specify a version number, or nightly to use the nightly CLI build. Note that the nightly builds have only undergone limited automated testing and should be considered unstable.

jobs:
  test:
    # [...]
    steps:
      # [...]
    - name: Deploy
      uses: DefangLabs/defang-github-action@v1.3.2
      with:
        cli-version: v2.10.0

Customizing the Defang Command

If you want to customize the Defang command that is run, you can specify it using the command input. This is useful if you want to run a command other than compose up or if you want to pass additional arguments to the command.

jobs:
  test:
    # [...]
    steps:
      # [...]
    - name: Deploy
      uses: DefangLabs/defang-github-action@v1.3.2
      with:
        command: "compose up --project-name my-project"

Full Example

Here is a full example of a GitHub workflow that does everything we've discussed so far:

name: Deploy

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: read
      id-token: write

    steps:
    - name: Checkout Repo
      uses: actions/checkout@v4

    - name: Deploy
      uses: DefangLabs/defang-github-action@v1.3.2
      with:
        cli-version: v2.10.0
        config-env-vars: "API_KEY DB_CONNECTION_STRING"
        cwd: "./test"
        compose-files: "./docker-compose.yaml"
        mode: "staging"
        provider: "aws"
        stack: "production"
        command: "compose up"
        verbose: true
      env:
        API_KEY: ${{ secrets.API_KEY }}
        DB_CONNECTION_STRING: ${{ secrets.DB_CONNECTION_STRING }}