TICS GitHub Action

The TiCS Github action integrates TiCS Client analysis to measure your code quality. The incorporated Quality gating feature enables you to analyze and decorate pull requests.

Before you start

Prerequisites

• A TiCS Viewer running somewhere on the network that is HTTP(S) accessible by the runner on which you want to execute the action.

Action Restrictions

• It will only be triggered on a pull request event.
• It is not working for forked repositories.
• It is not working for TiCS installations using the legacy deployment architecture.
• macOS runners (GitHub-hosted or self-hosted) are not yet supported.

Usage

Add the TiCS GitHub Action to your workflow to launch TiCS code analysis and post the results of Quality Gating feature as part of your pull request. Below is an example of how to include the TiCS GitHub Action step as part of your workflow:

name: Main Workflow 

on:
  pull_request: 
        types: [ opened, edited, synchronize, reopened ] 

jobs:
  TiCS-CI:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      # Triggering TiCS analysis and posting the results of Quality Gating feature as part of the pull request.
      - name: TiCS GitHub Action
        uses: tiobe/[email protected]
        env: 
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}}
          TICSAUTHTOKEN: ${{secrets.TICSAUTHTOKEN}}
        with:
          projectName: 'myproject'
          ticsConfiguration: 'https://192.168.1.1/tiobeweb/TICS/api/cfg?name=myconfiguration'
          clientToken: 'myclienttoken'
          calc: 'GATE'
          installTics: true

Action Runners

Linux and Windows based runners, both Github-hosted and self-hosted, are supported.

Environment Variables

The environment variables that are necessary for the action to function:

env: 
    GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN}}
    TICSAUTHTOKEN: ${{secrets.TICSAUTHTOKEN}}

• TICSAUTHTOKEN – It is required only when the TiCS viewer is not publicly accessible and requires an authentication token. You can create a TiCS Viewer Authentication token of role 'TICS Client' (see Configuring a token for TICS Client). You can then assign the TICSAUTHTOKEN value in the "Secrets" settings page of your repository, or add them at the level of your GitHub organization.
• GITHUB_TOKEN – Provided by Github (see Authenticating with the GITHUB_TOKEN).

Action Parameters

The following inputs are available for this action:

Input	Description	Required
projectName	Name of the TiCS project present in the TICS Viewer.	true
branchName	Name of the branch in TiCS.	false
branchDir	Location of the files to analyze.	false
calc	Comma-separated list of metrics to be used. GATE metric is supported for TiCS Viewer versions higher than 2022.2.x. If not specified, GATE will be used by default.	false
clientToken	A custom client-data token for the purpose of the Client Viewer functionality. This provides a static URL that is updated with every analysis.	false
tmpDir	Location to store debug information.	false
installTics	Boolean parameter to install TiCS command-line tools on a runner before executing the analysis. If not specified, TiCS should be installed manually on the machine that runs this job.	false
ticsConfiguration	A URL pointing to the "cfg" API endpoint of the TiCS Viewer. It contains the name of the TiCS Analyzer Configuration or "-" in case of the default configuration.	true