Two projects in one repository with GitHub Actions (monorepo)

Question

I am currently working on my personal e-commerce project that I am developing with Java/spring boot for the backend and angular for the frontend. Both projects (frontend and backend) are in a single repository on GitHub.

How can I set up single GitHub workflow for both projects ?

Screenshot of my project's repo

Answer 1

Since most actions assume your code is in the root of the project and the working-directory option doesn't work on job level you can do a little trick.

Assuming you have a directory structure like:

backend/
 - gradlew.sh
 - src/
frontend/
 - package.json
 - src

You can:

• create one job for the backend and one for the frontend
• move the subfolders to the root at the beginning of the job
• run commands/actions

This is what this could look like:

jobs:
  be:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - run: mv -f backend/* .
      - uses: actions/setup-java@v3
        with:
          java-version: 17
          distribution: temurin
      - run: ./gradlew check
  fe:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - run: mv -f frontend/* .
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v3
        with:
          node-version: 16
      - run: npm build && npm test

Be careful though: This mv just moves all contents from the subfolder into the root. If you have some other files in the root that might interfere, you should first clean the root by deleting all files and directories but the backend directory.