Multi configuration build with GitHub Action Matrices

Testing is a crucial part of software development, and there are several kinds of testing performed by software development teams. Configuration testing is one type of testing that verifies the performance of a system under different configurations. This blog explains how to use GitHub Actions Matrices to build the code with different configurations.

GitHub actions matrices allow to use of variables in a single job definition to create multiple jobs with different configurations. 

Let's get started.

We can define the variable as job.<jobid>.strategy.matrix. Following sample has two variables for OS values and version values. During the GitHub Actions pipeline run time, there will be multiple jobs with a combination of all the variables defined.

jobs:

  build:

    strategy:

      matrix:

        os: [ubuntu-22.04, ubuntu-20.04, windows-latest]

        version: [3.1.424, 5.0.100, 6.0.402]

Following is a sample pipeline that builds .NET application with combination of OS and .NET versions. You can enhance the pipeline by adding a test step to test the code with different .NET versions and OS versions. 

name: .NET

on:
  push:
    branches: [ "main" ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ "main" ]

jobs:
  build:
    strategy:
      matrix:
        os: [ubuntu-22.04, ubuntu-20.04, windows-latest]
        version: [3.1.424, 5.0.100, 6.0.402]

    runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }}

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3
    - name: Setup .NET
      uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v3
      with:
        dotnet-version: ${{ matrix.version }}
    - name: Restore dependencies
      run: dotnet restore "./actionsdemoapp/actionsdemoapp/actionsdemoapp.csproj"
    - name: Build
      run: dotnet build "./actionsdemoapp/actionsdemoapp/actionsdemoapp.csproj" --configuration Release  --no-restore

Once you run the pipeline, you would be able to see multiple jobs with different configuration.

Find sample pipeline code in GitHub