notify_when: 'failure' notifies when workflow passes with warnings

[tubbo]

We are seeing notifications for passing builds with "warnings" in Slack when we have notify_when: 'failure' set.

This only happens on a job that runs a Bash script in which there's a fallback for the initial action failing.

Our workflow looks like this:

name: Mergedown
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
    paths-ignore:
      - '*/CHANGELOG.md'
      - CHANGELOG.md
      - package.json
jobs:
  mergedown:
    name: Mergedown
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout Source Code
        uses: actions/[email protected]
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
          token: ${{ secrets.MERGEDOWN_TOKEN }}
      - name: Merge Updates from Main into Release Branches
        env:
          GH_TOKEN: ${{ github.token }}
        run: |
          git config user.name "${{ github.actor }}"
          git config user.email "${{ github.actor}}@users.noreply.github.com"
          for BRANCH in $(git branch --all --list | grep remotes/origin/release | sed 's/remotes\/origin\///g')
          do
            echo "Merging 'main' into '$BRANCH'..."
            git checkout $BRANCH
            git merge --no-verify origin/main && git push origin $BRANCH || (
              echo "Automatic mergedown failed for $BRANCH. Finding PR..."

              PR=$(
                gh api graphql \
                  --jq '.data.repository.pullRequests.nodes[0].id' \
                  -F branch="$BRANCH" \
                  -f query='
                    query FindPullRequest($branch: String!) {
                      repository(owner: "[REDACTED]", name: "[REDACTED]") {
                        pullRequests(headRefName: $branch, first: 1) {
                          nodes {
                            id
                          }
                        }
                      }
                    }
                  '
              )

              if [[ ! -z $PR ]]; then
                echo "Commenting on pull request with global ID $PR"

                gh api graphql \
                  -F pr=$PR \
                  -f query='
                    mutation AddComment($pr: ID!) {
                      addComment(input: {
                        body: "Mergedown of ${{ github.sha }} has failed.",
                        subjectId: $pr
                      }) {
                        clientMutationId
                      }
                    }'
              fi

              git merge --abort
            )
          done
      - name: Report Workflow Failure to Slack
        if: always()
        uses: ravsamhq/notify-slack-action@v1
        with:
          status: ${{ steps.decider.outputs.result }}
          notify_when: 'failure'
          message_format: '{emoji} *{workflow}* {status_message} in <{repo_url}|{repo}>'
          notification_title: Mergedown failed. This is probably an issue with the workflow, not an individual branch.
        env:
          SLACK_WEBHOOK_URL: ${{ secrets.SLACK_SOFTWARE_WEBHOOK_URL }}

This job passes in GitHub, and it's unclear from the output why it is throwing any warnings:

I suspect it has something to do with run's output and me misunderstanding how the (do this) || (or this if that doesn't work) technique in bash for falling back to another command if the first one fails, but either way I do see that notify_when allows me to specify if I want "passed with warnings" to be one of the statuses, so I'm thinking this action shouldn't be sending me the notification regardless.

edit:

This line of code might be the culprit: status: ${{ steps.decider.outputs.result }}

I copy/pasted this particular action from another workflow which has a "decider" step, but this one doesn't. I guess GitHub still lets this through but might just set this to status: null? Anyway, this could be the issue right here, as when I changed this to just use ${{ job.status }}, my warning notifications went away.

Is it possible that this action threw the warning, and it was just buried because it was the one actually doing the work of notifying me?

[ravsam-bot]

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[ketiko]

I am also seeing this behavior.

[ravgeetdhillon]

@tubbo @ketiko To get rid of the slow build speeds of Docker, we have released v2 which is written in Typescript. See this comment for more information.