ci-actions

Reusable GitHub Actions shared across the Cucumber C++ projects.

install-cpp-dep

Checks out a Cucumber C++ sub-project at a given ref, builds it with a CMake workflow preset, and installs it so downstream projects find it via find_package(). This replaces the copy-pasted "Checkout + Build and install cucumber_*" step pairs currently duplicated across every test-cpp.yaml job.

Inputs

Input	Required	Default	Description
repository	yes	—	owner/name to build (e.g. cucumber/messages).
ref	yes	—	Git ref (tag, branch, or SHA) to check out and build.
path	no	<name>-src	Checkout directory. Defaults to the repo name + -src.
preset	no	host-system	CMake workflow preset used to build the dependency.

Usage

A downstream workflow references it by owner/repo@ref. For example, query's test-cpp.yaml only needs to declare its direct dependency — messages:

env:
  MESSAGES_REF: e85a9eaf3fa3787c25bc62b6ea67672e709ee4fa

steps:
  - uses: actions/checkout@v7
    with:
      persist-credentials: false

  # ... install system packages (nlohmann-json, gtest, ...) ...

  - name: Install cucumber_messages
    uses: cucumber/ci-actions/install-cpp-dep@v1
    with:
      repository: cucumber/messages
      ref: ${{ env.MESSAGES_REF }}

  - name: Build and unit test
    working-directory: cpp
    run: cmake --workflow --preset test-system

pretty-formatter, which depends on query (and transitively messages), would add one call per dependency it builds:

  - name: Install cucumber_messages
    uses: cucumber/ci-actions/install-cpp-dep@v1
    with:
      repository: cucumber/messages
      ref: ${{ env.MESSAGES_REF }}

  - name: Install cucumber_query
    uses: cucumber/ci-actions/install-cpp-dep@v1
    with:
      repository: cucumber/query
      ref: ${{ env.QUERY_REF }}

Keeping the pinned refs up to date with Renovate

The *_REF values are plain git commits, which Renovate does not track out of the box. Two pieces are needed:

1. An annotation comment on each ref in the workflow, declaring the datasource, the repository, and the branch to follow:

   env:
     # renovate: datasource=git-refs depName=cucumber/messages packageName=https://github.com/cucumber/messages currentValue=main
     MESSAGES_REF: e85a9eaf3fa3787c25bc62b6ea67672e709ee4fa

   git-refs + currentValue=main tells Renovate to bump the pinned commit to the latest main (use a tag name here and datasource=github-tags to track releases instead).

2. A custom manager in the repo's .github/renovate.json that reads those annotations (add it once per repo, or centrally in cucumber/renovate-config):

   {
     "customManagers": [
       {
         "customType": "regex",
         "managerFilePatterns": ["/^\\.github/workflows/.+\\.ya?ml$/"],
         "matchStrings": [
           "# renovate: datasource=(?<datasource>\\S+) depName=(?<depName>\\S+) packageName=(?<packageName>\\S+) currentValue=(?<currentValue>\\S+)\\s+\\w+_REF:\\s*(?<currentDigest>[0-9a-f]{7,40})"
         ]
       }
     ]
   }

The actions/checkout pin inside install-cpp-dep/action.yml is handled automatically by Renovate's built-in github-actions manager — no annotation required.