Checkout: Using checkout twice, keeping the previous folder

[thewavelength]

What do I wanto to achieve?
I want to deploy the master-branch and the beta-branch to gh-pages at the same time. master should go to gh-pages/ (root folder) and beta-branch to gh-pages/beta-folder.

My idea
Currently I'm using actions/checkout twice (in a single job) with those two different branches. First I do checkout, then npm install && npm run build. Works quite well, until the second actions/checkout is executed. This action seems to remove the previous folder including all build results, so I'm unable to move both builds to a deploy-folder to finally publish it to gh-pages. See parts of my script for details:

    steps:
    - name: Use Node.js ${{ matrix.node-version }}
      uses: actions/setup-node@v1
      with:
        node-version: ${{ matrix.node-version }}
    - name: Checking out master
      uses: actions/checkout@v1
      with:
        ref: master
        path: master
    - name: Build master
      run: |
        npm install
        npm run build --if-present
      env:
        CI: true
# at this point, everything from master has been built and is on the filesystem of the runner
    - name: Checking out beta
      uses: actions/checkout@v1
      with:
        ref: beta
        path: beta
# at this point, everything from master seems to be lost in the filesystem
    - name: Build beta
      run: |
        npm install
        npm run build --if-present
      env:
        CI: true
    - name: GitHub Pages Deploy
      uses: maxheld83/[email protected]
      env:
        BUILD_DIR: deploy/
        GH_PAT: ${{ secrets.GH_PAT }}

Questions

1. Why is this behaviour? Am I understanding actions/checkout wrong?
2. Is there a better strategy to use to publish multiple things to gh-pages?

Notes
This idea works when not using actions/checkout but raw git clone. I guess that actions/checkout runs in some sort of docker container, which will be burned after operation.

[TingluoHuang]

actions/checkout has some special logic when it tries to handle the workflow triggering repository, since the triggering repository will become the GITHUB_WORKSPACE, so you can't use checkout action to make 2 copy of the triggering repository, the workaround I can think of is to write a script to clone/checkout the second copy of your repo.

[Trimud]

Shame, I was hoping this is possible...
As a workaround I did the following:
git clone https://<username>:${{ secrets.GH_TOKEN }}@github.com/<user>/<repo>

Edit: It's a private repo hence the token

[fregante]

Just use 2+ separate jobs, they'll run in parallel too. Then use "save/download artifacts" actions to share data between them, if necessary.

[Trimud]

You mean in different yml files or in the same action yml file?

[fregante]

You can have multiple jobs in the same workflow (yml)

[ericsciple]

@thewavelength i'm working on a PR to fix

will be in actions/checkout@v2 and will hopefully merge early next week

[gabrieljoelc]

For anyone else that's looking for a clear answer, setting the path of the second checkout uses allowed me to clone the second repo into a sub-directory:

steps:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    # Checks-out your repository under $GITHUB_WORKSPACE, so your job can access it
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      with:
        repository: gabrieljoelc/fresh-themes
        path: fresh-themes
    - run: ls

build output for the run:

README.md
default.yml
fresh-themes # <= 2nd repo here
manager.yml
node_modules
package-lock.json