Error message seems to be informational, non-error condition

[PartyLich]

I had attempted to use this action as part of a workflow that would ultimately open a PR to gh-pages, but encountered some behavior I did not expect. I'm getting an error as follows:

...
Pushing changes… (attempt 1 of 3)
/usr/bin/git push --porcelain ***github.com/PartyLich/cleopatra_cairo.git github-pages-deploy-action/mse3qzb3g:gh-pages_3df3d13
remote: 
remote: Create a pull request for 'gh-pages_3df3d13' on GitHub by visiting:        
remote:      https://github.com/PartyLich/cleopatra_cairo/pull/new/gh-pages_3df3d13
remote: 
To https://github.com/PartyLich/cleopatra_cairo.git
*	refs/heads/github-pages-deploy-action/mse3qzb3g:refs/heads/gh-pages_3df3d13	[new branch]
Done
Running post deployment cleanup jobs… 🗑️
/usr/bin/git checkout -B github-pages-deploy-action/mse3qzb3g
Reset branch 'github-pages-deploy-action/mse3qzb3g'
/usr/bin/chmod -R +rw github-pages-deploy-action-temp-deployment-folder
/usr/bin/git worktree remove github-pages-deploy-action-temp-deployment-folder --force
Error: The deploy step encountered an error: remote: 
remote: Create a pull request for 'gh-pages_3df3d13' on GitHub by visiting:        
remote:      https://github.com/PartyLich/cleopatra_cairo/pull/new/gh-pages_3df3d13
remote: ❌
Notice: Deployment failed! ❌

The error message displayed isn't a failure at all, it's an informational message about creating a PR from the new branch. But it's printing to stderr, and the current implementation treats this as an error and fails the workflow.

This seems like a bug (misidentification of failure condition), but perhaps it's something I've done.

The workflow at the time was

name: docs
on:
  push:
    branches: [ main ]

jobs:
  build-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-20.04
    steps:
    - name: Install Rust nightly
      uses: actions-rs/toolchain@v1
      with:
          toolchain: nightly
          override: true
          components: rustfmt, clippy
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3
    - name: Make Docs
      run: make docs
    - name: Jekyll fix
      run: touch target/doc/.nojekyll
    - name: Set short sha output
      id: short_sha
      run: echo "::set-output name=sha::$(git rev-parse --short HEAD)"
    - name: Update gh-pages
      uses: JamesIves/[email protected]
      with:
        branch: gh-pages_${{ steps.short_sha.outputs.sha }}
        clean: false
        commit-message: update html docs for ${{ github.sha }}
        folder: target/doc
        force: false

I've since fixed this and extended the functionality i needed (separate base and target branches, pr opening) in a fork, but if it is considered a bug for the upstream action I'll open an issue. If it's not a bug, I'd love to know what I did wrong or how my expectations were misguided.

[JamesIves]

I don't think there's an active way to make this work, but I think it would be a good improvement. Do you have any examples of the changes you made to make this possible?

[PartyLich]

The relevant branch of the forked action is here.
A successful run can be found here, but I'm not sure the visibility settings will allow you to see anything useful there.

Edit to add: because I separated base and target branches, some care (perhaps more than I've taken thus far) would be required to avoid breaking changes for users of current behavior

[JamesIves]

There's further discussion on this here: #1167

Going to close this discussion as we move towards a fix in issues!