Looking Glass

Looking Glass is a reporting agent that provides feedback to users based on a payload signature. Looking Glass reads the output of a previous GitHub action and then reports that output to the repository in a configurable manner. To use Looking Glass your action will need to set output matching the following payload signature:

Sample payload signature

{
  reports: [
    {
      filename: "the filename associated with the report",
      isCorrect: true,
      level: "info",
      display_type: "actions",
      msg: "the message",
      error: {
        expected: "the expected string",
        got: "the gotten string",
      },
    },
    {
      filename: "",
      isCorrect: false,
      display_type: "issues",
      level: "fatal",
      msg: "the message",
      error: {
        expected: "",
        got: "",
      },
    },
  ];
}

Key	Value	Description	Required	Values
filename	String	If there is a file associated with the report pass its full path as the value to filename	NO	Any string
isCorrect	Boolean	Was the task associated with this report completed correctly?	YES	true false
level	String	What is the severity of the report? Useful for applying labels to issues or highlighting text and other data in the GitHub Actions runner	YES	info warning fatal
display_type	String	Desired GitHub repository feature to use for displaying msg.	YES	actions issues pages (not currently supported) projects (not currently supported) pull_requests (not currently supported)
msg	String	Message to be provided to the user. Default value is Error.	NO	Any string
error.expected	String	If the msg is "Error" this field must be populated. This should be a short message describing what the expected value of the feedback payload. Example: "Expected path to be /docs"	NO	Any string
error.got	String	if the msg is "Error" this field must be populated. This should be a short message describing what the feedback payload actually sent to the Looking Glass. Example: "Got path /bread-crumbs"	NO	Any string

Using Looking Glass

Input Parameters

Parameter	Description	Required
feedback	Output from a previous action containing a stringified version of the payload signature.	YES
github-token	A token scoped with the ability to use repository features to provide feedback. It is best to use secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN as a value for this parameter.	YES

Basic configuration In this example Looking Glass reads the output of a previous action which has an ID of events as supplied input for the feedback parameter.

jobs:
  grade_lab:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: My grading action
        uses: mygrading/action-for-this-lab@v1.0.0
        id: events
        with:
          input_1: whatever input you need

      - name: Grading results
        uses: githubtraining/looking-glass-action@v1.0.0
        with:
          github-token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          feedback: ${{ steps.events.outputs.reports }}

Author Resources

Are you authoring an exercise? Here is a living collection of tools and resources to help you develop exercises with greater velocity 😄

• Looking-Glass-Payload-Tester, A tool to help you test your Looking Glass payloads manually so that you don't have to step through each exercise multiple times to determine if Looking Glass is going to behave as you expect.
• Author Pack, A collection of guides, tools and other documentation to help you author exercises!

Trouble With Looking Glass

Looking glass is currently in release version 1.0.0 which means it's still quite young and we are shipping to learn from our authors. If you run into a problem with Looking Glass please open an issue in this repository and feel free to ping @github/content-and-enablement in Slack if you don't receive a follow up quickly!

It's also important to check the releases page often since Looking Glass is likely to receive new features and other updates frequently leading up to it's first major release.

Please feel free to leave general feedback in an issue in this repository as well!