The Core Services team uses GitHub Actions to standardize our CI/CD process.

An earlier version of the 'Core' team wrote composite actions in this repository to provide a standardized way for teams to build, test, and deploy software. These actions have not been actively maintained in years and are considered deprecated by the current Core Services team.

• build
• build-apply
• build-publish
• cleanup
• deploy
• tf-apply
• tf-plan
• tf-plan-comment

1. They hide important pipeline details making it difficult for engineers to understand or troubleshoot CI/CD pipelines.
2. They have accumulated technical debt and do not reflect our current best practices.

The Core Services team is writing a standard set of reusable workflows defined in this same repository for use by our repos. This approach improves visibility, reduces hidden complexity, and ensures pipelines follow current standards.

• Use of these composite actions is at your own risk.
• The Core Services team will not maintain them.
• If your team still relies on them, we are happy to make you CODEOWNER for the relevant directories.

• Copy the composite action code directly into your workflow in place of calling the composite action.
• Consider writing your own reusable GHA or discuss with us ways to make ours more widely adoptable and maintainable.

Nothing in this repo is currently versioned. Changes here affect all consumers immediately. Make changes carefully and aim for passivity to avoid breaking existing workflows.

To test changes before merging into main:

1. Create a feature branch and make your changes.

2. Push the branch to GitHub.

3. Update a consuming repo’s workflow to reference your branch and push to GitHub. For example, if you are working on branch feature/CORE-123:

   uses: opensesame/core-github-actions/build-apply@feature/CORE-123

The same approach can be used for referencing feature branch versions of the reusable workflows.

The Core Services team is moving away from composite actions and building reusable workflows in this repository.

Reusable workflows make pipelines more transparent:

• Engineers see each build, lint, and test step clearly in the GitHub Actions run log.
• Hidden complexity is reduced — no more “magic” buried inside composite actions.

At this stage, the reusable workflows support Terraform-only projects.

• Expand reusable workflows to support repositories that require code build steps.
• Iterate toward the right patterns for publishing workflows that handle more complex pipelines.

Until broader reusable workflows are available:

• We are inlining the old composite action code directly into workflows in our repos.
• This makes pipelines explicit and easier to debug, while buying time to design maintainable patterns for future workflows.