There is the possibility that a lot of environments needed cannot or only be created in a time consuming manner in one of the provided runners. While one possibility is to use a selfhosted runner a far more straight forward solution could be to use containerization. Containers can provide an easy way to setup consistent environments and there is already a long list of pre build containers available (eg. on docker.hub.
It is also possitble to use a dockerfile to define a custom container environment, but in most cases it is sufficient to use a prebuild one.
In this example we will use the texlive/texlive:latest container to compile a simple latex document.
The sample document can be downloaded through
curl -L https://derse-ci.beuscher.dev/main.tex -o main.texContinuing our previous examples, we create a new job texlive:.
GitHub provides already a straight forward way of creating a docker environment on the ubuntu-latest image by adding a container key and specify the container.
{{#include .github/workflows/container-ci.yml:32:39}}After checking out the repository we need to download the previously saved artifact using an action provided by GitHub>
{{#include .github/workflows/container-ci.yml:40:44}}Finally we invoke latexmk, starting the compilation and create an Artifact for the main.pdf:
{{#include .github/workflows/container-ci.yml:45:47}}The container part of the final workflow should be similar to:
{{#include .github/workflows/container-ci.yml:48:}}Note that since the - in terms of file size - large container needs to be downloaded from docker.hub this workflow will run for some time.