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Github Actions: Bash shell -e -o pipefail#

Bash shell in Github actions by default is run with -e -o pipefail option. The full command used by Github actions is :

shell: /usr/bin/bash --noprofile --norc -e -o pipefail {0}

-o pipefail means that if any command in a pipeline fails, that return code will be used as the return code of the whole pipeline. And due to -e option, this makes the shell exit immediately if a command within the script exits with a non-zero status (i.e., fails). This is a good thing, but it can be a problem if you want to ignore the return code of a command in a pipeline. And especially in Github Actions output, you cannot see the error message of the command that failed. Github Actions just shows a generic error message: "Error: Process completed with exit code 1.", which makes it hard to debug.

For example, following command:

  • will success even grep does not find anything in a standard bash shell (your local VM for example)
  • but will fail in Github actions bash shell with the error message "Error: Process completed with exit code 1.".
echo "hello world" | grep "foo" | wc -l

If you do not care about the grep result, to bypass this, you can use || true at the end of the grep command. This will make sure that the return code of the grep command is always 0.

echo "hello world" | { grep "foo" || true ; } | wc -l

To verify current bash shell options, you can use set -o command:

set -o
# or
$ set -o | grep -E "errexit|pipefail"
errexit         off
pipefail        off

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