Using Github actions to automate tasks

Post a comment with ontology differences on pull request

The command line tool Robot has a diff tool that compares two ontology files and can print the differences between them in multiple formats, among them markdown.

We can use this tool and GitHub actions to automatically post a comment when a Pull Request to master is created, with the differences between the two ontologies.

To create a new GitHub action, create a folder in your ontology project root folder called .github. Then create a yaml file in a subfolder called workflows, e.g. .github/workflows/diff.yml. This file contains code that will be executed in GitHub when certain conditions are meant, in this case, when a PR to master is submitted. The comments in this file from FYPO will help you write an action for your own repository.

The comment will look something like this.