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elm-tooling-cli

CI setup

This page explains how to install Elm tools from elm-tooling.json in a Continuous Integration (CI) scenario, such as GitHub Actions.

See the Example GitHub Actions workflow for inspiration. Even if you don’t use GitHub Actions it’s still a good resource – there’s a lot of comments and the concepts and steps should be fairly similar regardless of what CI you use.

Basically, you need to:

  1. Install npm packages, with NO_ELM_TOOLING_INSTALL set. It’s nice to cache node_modules (based on your package.json and package-lock.json) for speed and reliability.

    Setting the NO_ELM_TOOLING_INSTALL environment variable turns elm-tooling install into a no-op, in case you have a "postinstall": "elm-tooling install" script in your package.json. In CI it’s better to install npm packages and elm-tooling.json tools separately so you can cache node_modules and ~/.elm separately.

  2. Install tools from elm-tooling.json: npx elm-tooling install. Make sure that ~/.elm is cached (or ELM_HOME if you’ve set it), based on elm.json (because it lists your Elm dependencies and the Elm compiler installs packages into ~/.elm) and elm-tooling.json (because it lists your tools and elm-tooling downloads them into ~/.elm) as well as review/elm.json if you use elm-review or whatever other elm.json files you might have.

    Note that Windows uses %APPDATA%\elm rather than ~/.elm. If you need to run the same CI workflow both Windows and some other OS, set ELM_HOME to a directory that works everywhere.

  3. Run whatever commands you want.

mpizenberg/elm-tooling-action

mpizenberg/elm-tooling-action is a GitHub Action that:

  • Contains its own copy of elm-tooling and runs elm-tooling install for you.
  • Caches ~/.elm for you (in a way that works on both Windows and other operating systems).

It’s primarily made for projects that don’t have a package.json (it’s up to every contributor to install Elm and elm-format etc themselves). Such projects still need to install the tools in CI somehow, and elm-tooling-action fits exactly that need.

You can use elm-tooling-action even if you have a package.json and have elm-tooling in there. But beware that you might not be running exactly the same version of elm-tooling locally and in CI! So if something works locally but not in CI (or vice versa), that could be the culprit. You don’t save super much YAML config by using the action in this case, so it’s currently not recommended. But you decide!