yq not found, installed with snap in GH actions

[itaysk]

• I have a GitHub actions workflow that uses yq
• it does sudo snap install yq
• It was working well, and recently starting to fail (a couple of weeks ago it was fine)
• it fails for not finding yq (yq: command not found)
• I even tried the following action which fails: sudo snap install yq && yq --version
• if I ssh into the worker to debug (using the tmate action), I can use yq. took this debugging info:

$ which yq
/snap/bin/yq

$ echo $PATH
/usr/share/rust/.cargo/bin:/home/runner/.config/composer/vendor/bin:/home/runner/.dotnet/tools:/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/bin:/home/linuxbrew/.linuxbrew/sbin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin:/home/runner/.dotnet/tools

This might be a Github Actions issue, or a snapcraft issue, but I thought to check here as well if you know about a change to yq (or it's packaging) that might cause this.

[mikefarah]

Not a clue sorry - I tried snap on a VM and is seems to work.

There is an official github action you can use: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/yq-portable-yaml-processor.

Alternatively, you could also download the binary using wget or something from the releases...

[itaysk]

thanks

[pranas]

I noticed the same thing. Snap release was updated on April 18 which is when it stopped working. Still trying to figure out whether it's Snap or yq packaging issue.

[itaysk]

thanks for reporting @pranas , let me know if I should reopen this issue or not

[itaysk]

@mikefarah I just want to point out that the yq GH action does't work as well. Here's a minimal failing pipeline, am I doing something wrong?:

name: test
jobs:
  build:
    name: build
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: yq
        uses: mikefarah/[email protected]
      - name: test
        run: yq --version

[itaysk]

it seems that the gh action is using docker so yq won't be available outside the step. still trying to make the original use case (snap install) work.

[pranas]

We switched to installing binaries from GitHub Releases:

- name: Install yq
  run: |
    sudo wget -O /usr/local/bin/yq https://github.com/mikefarah/yq/releases/download/3.3.0/yq_linux_amd64
    sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/yq

[itaysk]

@pranas I was about to do the same thing, thanks for confirming!

[mikefarah]

Yeah not sure what's going on with snap - downloading the binary direct makes sense to me...

[sarumont]

FYI, brew seems to work still (Homebrew for Linux is installed on ubuntu-latest):

      - name: install tooling
        run: |
          brew install yq

[remi-debette]

Hi,

brew is working but is kind of slow (circa 1min) and it cannot pin a specific version of yq, which could break the pipelines.
In comparison the yq action installs in seconds.

I found that I cannot run multiline command in the current yq action. The following does not execute but returns a success:

    - name: Apply YQ
      uses: mikefarah/[email protected]
      with:
        cmd: |
          cd ./somedir

          yq w -i ${HELM_VALUES_FILE} flask.image.tag ${{ needs.set-data.outputs.version }}
          yq w -i ${HELM_VALUES_FILE} nginx.image.tag ${{ needs.set-data.outputs.version }}

So is only the binary what is supported in real github action use cases?

[mikefarah]

Hmm seems so - I have to confess, I've never used github actions IRL. When I added the github action it was based on what I read and what some yq users were asking.

If there's a better way to publish the action I'm open to suggestions. Otherwise, as there are compiled, dependency free binaries, I don't see why you wouldn't just wget the binary and go with that?

[tyrann0us]

If there's a better way to publish the action I'm open to suggestions. Otherwise, as there are compiled, dependency free binaries, I don't see why you wouldn't just wget the binary and go with that?

@mikefarah, I understand that a one-liner like the one suggested by @pranas is an option to run yq in GitHub Actions. However, it is far more verbose compared to a simple - uses: mikefarah/[email protected], which is the common way to include third-party packages in your workflow.

So it would be really great if there'd be an easy way to use yq without having to wget it manually.
Thanks!

[molteninjabob]

I just found yq and the Github Action and can confirm that even in the latest release (3.4.1) I still get the yq: command not found error. I'll try the workarounds listed above.