Actions CI/CD

Actions automate your design process

Welcome to AllSpice Actions.

This section introduces some high-level concepts and definitions of Actions.

Background

What is Hardware DevOps?

Hardware DevOps
Hardware DevOps (development operations) combines practices and tools that enable engineers to streamline and automate their design process.

This increases a team’s efficiency while providing organizations greater visibility and traceability into their hardware development operations.

What is CI (Continuous Integration)?

Continuous Integration (CI)

Continuous Integration (CI) for hardware involves regularly validating changes from the start of the design cycle. Unlike traditional cycles that take weeks or months between validations, CI automates these checks and performs them continuously with every design update.

AllSpice Actions: CI + DevOps for Hardware

Actions is a feature in the AllSpice platform that helps your hardware team implement CI practices. With AllSpice Actions, you can create workflows that automatically run tests whenever there’s an update.

Build an automation engine once, and benefit each time you update your PCBs, schematics, or BOMs

Here’s some more details. To learn more, visit How does AllSpice Actions work?

Actions overview

Actions is the name of our automation features.

Workflows are files that define how to set-up and run pre-existing or custom Add-Ons or scripts.
Examples:

.allspice/workflows/your_workflow.yml

.allspice/workflows/generate_BOM.yml

.allspice/workflows/create_release.yml

Triggers run the workflow files automatically after common actions like pushing files to AllSpice. They are defined in the workflow files.

Task (steps) setup the runner environment, run existing Add-Ons or custom scripts. These can use out-of-the-box modules like Add-ons, or execute code in any language, and connect to any external API.

Runners trigger the Workflows, setup the environments, execute Tasks, store files, and report pass/fail status.

With Actions, we simply find an error, fix it, and create a Workflow. Afterwards, we

never miss them or have to manually fix it, ever again.

-Senior Electrical Engineer

Next up: What can my team and I do with AllSpice Actions?

Need to debug as you’re getting started? Learn how easy it is to troubleshoot actions here. And as always, feel free to reach out to support@allspice.io with any questions.