How to build, run and call docker container in Github Action

We can achieve this with following approach.

Advantages :

• No need to push the intermediate docker build
• We can build docker in one step and use it in another step without pushing it to any registry
• We need docker/build-push-action to build the docker and addnab/docker-run-action to run the docker.

The following example shows a unit testing flow. But the concept remains same with your flow.

... jobs: unittest: runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: - name: Checkout code uses: actions/checkout@v3 - uses: docker/setup-buildx-action@v2 - uses: docker/build-push-action@v4 with: context: . file: "Dockerfile.test" tags: localpytest:latest load: true cache-from: type=gha cache-to: type=gha,mode=max push: false - name: Run Pytest uses: addnab/docker-run-action@v3 with: image: localpytest:latest run: pytest 

• For addnab/docker-run-action, observe the load parameter. The default value for this is false. This has to be true to use an image from one step in another step.
• For docker/build-push-action, observe the push parameter as false. So we are not pushing it to any docker registry.
• Github also provides docker layer caching. This helps to improve speed in later builds.

For this purpose, you could use a combination of https://github.com/marketplace/actions/build-and-push-docker-images and https://github.com/addnab/docker-run-action

The first would build and publish a container, and the second would take this container and run your commands there.

The example is below. I don't use this setup myself but I have tested it. Replace username/container with your username and container.

name: Docker Image CI on: push: branches: [ master ] pull_request: branches: [ master ] jobs: compile: name: Build and run the container runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: - name: Set up QEMU uses: docker/setup-qemu-action@v1 - name: Set up Docker Buildx uses: docker/setup-buildx-action@v1 - name: Login to DockerHub uses: docker/login-action@v1 with: username: ${{ secrets.DOCKERHUB_USERNAME }} password: ${{ secrets.DOCKERHUB_TOKEN }} - name: Build and push uses: docker/build-push-action@v2 with: push: true tags: username/container - name: Check out the repo uses: actions/checkout@v2 - name: Run the build process with Docker uses: addnab/docker-run-action@v3 with: image: username/container:latest options: -v ${{ github.workspace }}:/data run: | echo "Hello World" 

Note that building a container is quite a long task and might deplete your Github Action limits quickly. You might consider building/publishing a container separately, or add better caching here (i.e. to rebuild it only on Dockerfile change)

Note that you need to set up DOCKERHUB_USERNAME and DOCKERHUB_TOKEN secrets.

Instead of echo "Hello World", use the commands you want to run. The repo data will be in the /data directory, for this setup.