How to get all files changed compared to another branch?

[bearhuglily]

For example, our main branch is master and that is the other branch I want to compare any other feature branch to. Right now, if I make changes to say, 5 files, on my tf-test-branch, and one of them fails the lint check I have, any other files left to check after don't get checked because the whole github action stops. So then I fix the one file and re-push, and now the list of changed files is just that one file. How can I change that so that it is all five files again?

Here are my checkout and changed-files steps:

# Checkout the repository and fetch all history for all branches and tags
    - name: Checkout code
      uses: actions/checkout@v3
      with:
        fetch-depth: 0
# Get a list of yaml files that have changed in the current branch under templates
    - name: Get changed files
      id: getfiles
      uses: tj-actions/changed-files@v37
      with:
        files: templates/**/*.yaml

[jackton1]

@bearhuglily Can you also include the GitHub event that triggers the workflow?

[bearhuglily]

Trigger:

# The workflow triggers on push and pull request events that change YAML files in the templates/ directory or its subdirectories
on:
  push:
    paths:
      - 'templates/**/*.yaml'
  pull_request:
    paths:
      - 'templates/**/*.yaml'

[jackton1]

Okay, It appears that the push event is also getting triggered by new commits you push to the branch, and what you want in this case is on pull_request which would contain all files that have been changed in your branch compared to master

name: CI

on:
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - master

[bearhuglily]

If I added the master branch to the pull_request event like you have, would keeping the push event for any branch still cause the same problem?

[jackton1]

The push event, in this case, means the workflow runs every time a new commit is pushed and in such a case the concept of comparing the current commit is limited to either the previous commit or the last remote commit.

For pull_request on the other hand, it's triggered by other activities to the PR branch including pushing a new commit to the same branch. But in this case, the diff compares the current commit to the last commit on the target branch which in your case is master.

So no keeping push wouldn't cause any problems it solves a different problem i.e. what changed since I last pushed to a branch.

My recommendation would be to remove the push event since that's not the desired outcome you are looking for.

[bearhuglily]

I think I'm understanding. Thank you so much for your help!

[jackton1]

Anytime