#DevHack: Running a background service on GitHub Actions

Running background services on GitHub Actions can be helpful when you want to run some tests. For instance, start up the local server before running the tests. In my case, I was testing out Dev Proxy on GitHub Actions to see if I could use it in combination with Playwright to provide my mocks for my tests. Unfortunately, GitHub Actions does not support running multiple steps in parallel, so I had to find a workaround.

When searching for ways to run background processes on Linux environments, I found a solution to using an ampersand & at the end of the command.

Using the ampersand starts the service in the background and allows you to continue with the following command.

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npm start &

info

Thanks Michael Heap for confirming that this is the right approach.

Starting a background service in your GitHub Actions workflow

The same approach can be used in GitHub Actions. When you use the ampersand & in your step, it starts up the service and continues to the next step in your workflow.

Here is an example of how to start a service in the background and then run your tests.

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name: Run tests

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
      - dev

jobs:
  testing:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4

      - name: Install dependencies
        run: npm ci

      - name: Start service
        run: npm start &

      - name: Run tests
        run: npm test

In the above example, the npm start & command starts the local server in the background and continues to the next step: running the tests.

I hope this helps you when running a background service on GitHub Actions.