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Actions CI/CD
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Actions automate your design process
Welcome to AllSpice Actions.
This section introduces some high-level concepts and definitions of Actions.
Continuous Integration (CI)
CI is part of development operations (DevOps).
CI is the practice of automating the integration of design changes from multiple contributors into a single project.
Actions
An action is the basic reusable block of CI. It’s just a program or series of programs that you call from your workflow
.allspice/workflows/your_workflow.yml
Actions allow you to
automate repetitive and error-prone processes
to let the engineers focus on the creative design challenges.
Actions is just an easy way to say automation program.
Actions trigger automatically
Automation programs are
triggered
by standard actions likeuploading files to version control
, starting orfinishing a design review
.Triggers are defined in your workflow files
.allspice/workflows/your_workflow.yml
Engineering teams gain rapid improvements on their process by relying on Actions to automate instead of manual operations.
Actions help your design team
Process BOM/Assembly
Availability checks
Lifecycle checks (PLM)
COGS (ERP)
CM BOM Diff Report
Extended quote/forecasting
PCB cost/schedule options
Quotes with multiple quantities
Date extended quantity is available
Process Schematics
Verify symbols
Reference designators
Symbol attributes
MFG/MPN/Value/etc
Netlist
Static analysis
Power/GND misconnects
Voltage level checks between components
Process PCBAs
Verify footprints
Verify design rules match (DRC is no good if the rules are wrong)
Create trace report (Current/Power/Width)
Generate stack-up documentation
Generate documentation (Sch/PCB Design Review/Release notes/Fab files)
Regulate releases
File pattern match
Flag missing files
Generate report
Connect to any public API
PLM/ERP (Cofactr/PTC)
Distributors (Digikey/Mouser/Newark/Octopart)
Task management (Jira)
Create Read Update Delete (CRUD) cloud “office” documents
MS365 (Excel/Word/Powerpoint)
Google docs (Sheets/Docs/Slides)
Network sync (Dropbox/MS365/iCloud)
Actions high-level overview
Actions can seem a bit abstract, but it’s really just code running on a computer
Workflows
Workflows are the scaffolding of your automation. They are the code that loads the automation code. Workflows are easy to read and write
yaml
files that define the following:
Load software container
Ubuntu LTS 2024 (Debian flavored Linux distro)
Load dependencies
Software libraries
Design Files
API tools
Secrets/tokens/keys
Run programs
Actions - Pre-built no-code automation programs
Python - Programs can be written in python and access our AllSpice.io API via our py-allspice python module.
C/C++, use the same language as firmware development
Any programming language that can run on Debian/Ubuntu Linux
Extend existing automation
Workflows can be broken into modules that can be reused and extended.
Next steps
We recommend the Actions Quickstart guide to start quickly.