Notes for reviewers:

CI stuff is always weird to test. Here were the steps that I took.

Testing the new action

I created a temporary test-publish-action.yml (removed in e7929ef) that would run the new action every time I pushed to the branch. With this, I was able to test calling the action and making sure I was passing/using the inputs to the action correctly. With some finagling, I was able to call the Docker publish action succesffully.

Since we don't want to actually publish to Docker, I didn't let the step complete. However, I let it run deep into the process before cancelling. This run can be found here.

Testing dependent jobs

We also want to be sure that the new release action still works, and that the action will successfully be called when the release completes. If you look at the diff of the release.yml, I've mainly removed stuff and added the dependent publish-docker job.

To test the dependency, I commented out most of the meaningful code in the release job, and the actual calling of the new action in publish-docker job (calling this job was copied verbatim from my above test using test-publish-action.yml. All that should happen with these commented out jobs is: 1. release runs npm ci 2. once the release is finished, publish-docker would checkout the branch. This can be seen working here. Note that the publish-docker job can be rerun independently if it fails.

Summary

My goal with the above tests was to prove that the new action can successfully publish to docker, that we are correctly calling this new action from the release job, and that the release job no longer relies on the publish-docker job to finish the release.

Let me know if there are more tests you'd like to see to feel comfortable with this.