GitHub workflow action with docker compose

Question

I'm trying to setup CI with GitHub Actions. My project is using docker & docker-compose (Laradock actually, but that does not matter). It is the first time I'm setting up a workflow/ action with GitHub. I'm used to gitlab-ci... however

In one step I'm running the docker containers:

• docker-compose up -d nginx mariadb

Creating laradock_mariadb_1 ... 
Creating laradock_docker-in-docker_1 ... 

Creating laradock_mariadb_1          ... done

Creating laradock_docker-in-docker_1 ... done
Creating laradock_workspace_1        ... 

Creating laradock_workspace_1        ... done
Creating laradock_php-fpm_1          ... 

Creating laradock_php-fpm_1          ... done
Creating laradock_nginx_1            ... 

Creating laradock_nginx_1            ... done

And in the next step I want to use the containers:

• docker-compose exec workspace composer install

This fails with the message: No container found for workspace_1

I am assuming I need to do something like creating an artifact for the first step and use it in the second step. At least that's something you'd do in GitLab CI.

I have not found any examples or solutions on the internet. I guess because GitHub's Actions is still a very new feature. So hopefully this thread will help other beginners as well.

EDIT

• My full workflow: tests.yml
• docker-compose.yml from Laradock (it's the one my project uses too)

Conservatism

Can you post your actual docker-compose.yml and workflow yml file. Github action steps do not run in separate environments – Underarm

@Underarm I attached them to the post. – Conservatism

See if this link helps: forums.docker.com/t/… It seems the problem is that you needed to do docker-compose up -d workspace before running this step – Underarm

@Underarm Thank you but it is definetely up, as you can see from the logs of the previous step. This works perfectly on my local machine. – Conservatism

I just tested the ability to run a command in a Docker-Compose container started by a GitHub Actions step earlier - and it works as this build log shows. I have a slightly different Docker-Compose setup (here's the full project), so I guess it has something to do with specific configuration or directory structure of yours? An example project on GitHub solely for this would help... – Monodrama

Just be sure to exec into the containers with the -T parameter like this: docker-compose exec -T workspace composer install. With this parameter you can switch off the default pseudo-tty allocation by Compose. Otherwise you'll run into errors like the input device is not a TTY. Also you could use a docker ps -a to show all running containers, so you should see if there's really no workspace_1... (example build here) – Monodrama