Running E2E Tests with the Typesense in GitHub Action

When using Typesense you might want to run end-to-end tests - these are tests that run with real instances of your application's dependencies and not against mocks.

Running your tests against an actual Typesense instance increases the confidence in your code and the contract between your app and Typesense. Adding Typesense to a GitHub Action is pretty straightforward.

There are two options:

Option 1: Pre-Built action

There is a GitHub Action built a member of the Typesense Community. You'll find it in the GitHub marketplace at jirevwe/typesense-github-action (opens new window) and install it from there.

You can configure the Typesense server in your workflow YAML file. Depending on your needs, you may configure it to run on a different port or you may make run your tests against a matrix of multiple Typesense versions.

Here's a sample configuration using the jirevwe/typesense-github-action (opens new window) package to add Typesense to your GitHub Actions:

name: Run tests

on: [push]

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    strategy:
      matrix:
        typesense-version: [0.22.0, 0.23.1]

    steps:
      - name: Start Typesense
        uses: jirevwe/typesense-github-action@v1.0.1
        with:
          typesense-version: ${{ matrix.typesense-version }}
          typesense-port: 20863

      - name: Curl Typesense
        run: sleep 10 && curl http://localhost:8108/health

This workflow setup runs your action's steps against each version of Typesense specified in the typesense-version list. This allows you run your tests against multiple versions of Typesense. One usecase of running your tests against multiple versions is if you want to be sure that updating your Typesense self-hosted or cloud version won't break your app's functionality.

There's a full example of how this works here (opens new window).

Option 2: Without Dependencies

If you want something direct without any additional dependencies, add this to your GitHub actions config file:

name: Run tests

on: [push]

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    strategy:
      matrix:
        # versions are wrapped in quotes to preserve the exact versions
        # especially numbers that has "0" on right-most side (e.g. 26.0)
        typesense-version: ['0.25.2', '26.0']
        typesense-port: ['8108:8108']

    services:
      typesense:
        image: typesense/typesense:${{ matrix.typesense-version }}

    steps:
      - name: Start Typesense
        run: |
          docker run -d \
          -p ${{ matrix.typesense-port }} \
          --name typesense \
          -v /tmp/typesense:/data \
          typesense/typesense:${{ matrix.typesense-version}} \
          --api-key=xyz \
          --data-dir /data \
          --enable-cors

      - name: Curl Typesense
        run: sleep 1 && curl http://localhost:8108/health

A full example file can be found here: jaeyson/ex_typesense (opens new window).

And that's it!