Checking out Django in a GitHub Action¶

In order to use Sphinx interlinks to Django, I need a checkout of Django for the djangodocs extension it uses.

That works fine locally, where I’ve got a Django checkout, but I needed the same in my GitHub Action to automatically build and deploy the built docs.

GitHub already gives us the checkout action that you’ll use in ≈ every

workflow to get your source code:

- uses: actions/checkout@v2

We need to re-use that to also checkout Django:

- name: Fetch Django
    uses: actions/checkout@v2
    with:
    repository: django/django
    path: django

This goes after you checkout your main repo, since there’s a nice delete everything step, which catches you otherwise.

The path is relative to the cwd, so Django goes into ./django. To use this I set DJANGO_PATH: ./django in the env when building the docs.

You can set it up to checkout into sibling directories, but then you’d need to adjust the cwd for all your action steps. Having django in the top dir was fine for me, so nested it is.

The action repo has a whole load of options for more complex cases.