I'm working on a github actions workflow and have sent an environment variable:
env:
rundate: $(date --date="2 days ago" '+%Y%m%d')
If I check that in the terminal on local, I see what I need:
echo $(date --date="2 days ago" '+%Y%m%d')
20220721
But, when trying to use in workflow, in this case to set the path of where to download an artifact to:
- name: Download BQ data from previous job
uses: actions/download-artifact@v2
with:
name: bq-data
path: _${{ env.rundate }}data.tsv
Expected/desired a path of _20220721data.csv but in the runner console I see:
/_"$(date --date="2 days ago" '+%Y%m%d')"data.tsv
How can I set the env variable to be a string, the string in this case here and now being 20220721 as opposed to being the method of calculating the value?
You're trying to set the value of a variable to the result of executing a shell script. You can't do that in the env section of a github action, which can only have static values (or references to context values, like ${{ github.ref }}). In this case, you're simply setting the value of rundate to the literal string $(date --date="2 days ago" '+%Y%m%d').
You can have a step emit your desired value as a labelled output using the set-output command, and then refer to those outputs in subsequent steps:
jobs:
example:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- id: set_date
run: |
timestamp="$(date --date="2 days ago" '+%Y%m%d')"
echo "::set-output name=timestamp::$timestamp"
- name: Download BQ data from previous job
uses: actions/download-artifact@v2
with:
name: bq-data
path: _${{ steps.set_date.outputs.timestamp }}data.tsv