Listed limitations of reusable workflows incomplete

[cmitz]

Code of Conduct

• I have read and agree to the GitHub Docs project's Code of Conduct

What article on docs.github.com is affected?

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/learn-github-actions/reusing-workflows#limitations

What part(s) of the article would you like to see updated?

I would like to have this limitation included:

• Reusable workflows do not support the strategy property.

That is because I tried using a reusable workflow with that property but GitHub Actions errored with this error:

The workflow is not valid. .github/workflows/deploy_release.yml (Line: 22, Col: 5): Unexpected value 'strategy' .github/workflows/deploy_release.yml (Line: 31, Col: 21): Unrecognized named-value: 'matrix'. Located at position 1 within expression: matrix.package_type

Additional information

[welcome]

Thanks for opening this issue. A GitHub docs team member should be by to give feedback soon. In the meantime, please check out the contributing guidelines.

[skedwards88]

🤔 I wasn't able to reproduce this. e.g. something like this worked for me (https://github.com/ske-test-org/test-org-repo/actions/runs/1518627718):

name: Reusable workflow example

on:
 workflow_call:

jobs:
 example_job:
 name: Print input and secrets to STDOUT
 runs-on: ubuntu-latest
 strategy:
 matrix:
 node: [10, 12, 14]

 steps:
 - name: Print
 run: echo "done"

Since it looks like the docs don't need to be updated, I am going to close out this issue and PR. Please comment with more details about the failure you observe (e.g. link to a public workflow run log) if you think the docs still need an update! For troubleshooting, GitHub Support Community might be a better place to post.

Even though we didn't accept this contribution, I hope to see more from you in the future! I especially liked that you included the error message in your issue--that type of context helps a ton!

[cmitz]

@skedwards88 Thank you for taking the time to look at this and creating the counterexample. However, the issue will still persist if you add the strategy to the caller workflow, like this:

name: Call a reusable workflow

on:
 push:
 workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
 call-workflow-passing-data:
 uses: ske-test-org/test-org-repo/.github/workflows/called.yml@main
 strategy:
 matrix:
 node: [10, 12, 14]

I've made an example repository+action run here: https://github.com/cmitz/actions-test-organization/actions/runs/1519814069

To highlight the differences:

• The calling workflow does not support strategy
• The called reusable workflow does support strategy

[skedwards88]

Thanks for the clarification and supporting data! I am re-opening this issue and PR.

[cmitz]

Awesome, thanks! 🚀