Eric J Ma's Website

Today, in releasing a new version of LlamaBot, I also made a change for one of the SimpleBots that I wrote to use the Mistral AI models instead of GPT-4. That meant that I needed to use a Mistral API key as part of the environment variables. However, no matter what I tried, I couldn't seem to get the environment variable set within my GitHub action, even though it was declared as an Actions Repository-level secret.

Turns out, declaring an Actions Repository secret doesn't immediately make it available to the GitHub Actions runner! According to the official documentation,

GitHub Actions can only read a secret if you explicitly include the secret in a workflow.

(Source: GitHub Actions docs)

This turns out to be a great security practice, even if it caused me no end of frustration for over 3 hours this evening. But how do we include it in a workflow step? It is done this way:

    - step:
      - name: Write release notes
        ##### PAY ATTENTION HERE! #####
        env:
          MISTRAL_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.MISTRAL_API_KEY }}
        ##### PAY ATTENTION HERE! #####
        run: |
          python -m pip install -e .
          llamabot configure api-key --api-key="${{ secrets.OPENAI_API_KEY }}"
          llamabot configure default-model --model-name="${{ secrets.DEFAULT_LANGUAGE_MODEL }}"
          llamabot git write-release-notes # <-- this line needs access to the MISTRAL_API_KEY environment variable!