Having an issue with

can-i-merge

not waiting the full 8 minutes I've set for the retry interval, which is causing it to fail since it isn't waiting for verification status to be published. I've set the arguments

retry-while-unknown=25 retry-interval=20

. This used to work before but only broke now, I don't see any changes to how we are invoking the pact cli. Here is my

yaml

command in github actions:

make -sC "${SERVICE_FOLDER}" dev pact_can_i_merge pacticipant=${{ inputs.stack }}-${{ inputs.service }} version=${{ github.sha }} retry-while-unknown=25 retry-interval=20

and

pact_can_i_merge

is defined in a makefile like so:

pact_can_i_merge:
	$(call compose,$(compose_files),--profile pact_broker run pact-broker-cli pact-broker can-i-merge --pacticipant $(pacticipant) --version $(version) --retry-while-unknown=$(retry-while-unknown) --retry-interval=$(retry-interval))

which is invoking a docker compose that looks like this

pact-broker-cli:
    image: pactfoundation/pact-cli:latest-multi
    # We only want to run this service in CI, not locally
    profiles:
      - pact_broker
    depends_on:
      - test
    environment:
      PACT_BROKER_BASE_URL: <<https://my-pactflow-url.com>>
      PACT_BROKER_TOKEN: ${PACTFLOW_TOKEN}
      PACT_CONSUMER_BRANCH: ${PACT_CONSUMER_BRANCH}
      PACT_CONSUMER_APP_VERSION: ${PACT_CONSUMER_APP_VERSION}
    volumes:
      - pacts_data:/pact/pacts

Just checked now

🕙18:57:02 [🧱 INT] ❯ time pact-broker can-i-merge -b <http://localhost:9292> --pacticipant consumer --version foo --retry-while-unknown=5 --retry-interval=1
Waiting for 1 verification result to be published (maximum of 5 seconds)
Computer says no ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

CONSUMER | C.VERSION | PROVIDER | P.VERSION | SUCCESS? | RESULT#
---------|-----------|----------|-----------|----------|--------
consumer | foo       | provider | ???       | ???      |

There is no verified pact between version foo of consumer and a version of provider from the main branch (no such version exists)
pact-broker can-i-merge -b <http://localhost:9292> --pacticipant consumer  foo   0.16s user 0.07s system 4% cpu 5.414 total

just set it going with your values now (with 1.75.4 of the cli)

time pact-broker can-i-merge -b <http://localhost:9292> --pacticipant consumer --version foo --retry-while-unknown=25 --retry-interval=20
Waiting for 1 verification result to be published (maximum of 500 seconds)
Waiting for 1 verification result to be published (maximum of 500 seconds)
Computer says no ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

CONSUMER | C.VERSION | PROVIDER | P.VERSION | SUCCESS? | RESULT#
---------|-----------|----------|-----------|----------|--------
consumer | foo       | provider | ???       | ???      |

There is no verified pact between version foo of consumer and a version of provider from the main branch (no such version exists)
pact-broker can-i-merge -b <http://localhost:9292> --pacticipant consumer  foo   0.19s user 0.14s system 0% cpu 8:21.17 total

~ via 🐳 desktop-linux took 8m21s

my broker client is the latest version (running standalone not via docker) I am not the latest broker image however

Thank you so much for helping me confirm that the

pact-cli

was not the issue, and sorry it took so long for me to come back to this. I figured out the root cause of the issue, and it was not pact: the problem was github actions and the silly workaround we are doing to deal with pact in a monorepo in gha. We have a job named

pact-consumer-test

in the monorepo that runs the consumer tests in our monorepo that has these two steps:

- name: Run Consumer Tests
        if: inputs.service == 'flow-controller'
        env:
          PACT_BROKER_BASE_URL: <https://updaterinc.pactflow.io/>
          PACTFLOW_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PACTFLOW_TOKEN }}
          PACT_CONSUMER_BRANCH: ${{ github.ref_name }}
          PACT_CONSUMER_APP_VERSION: ${{ github.sha }}
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          SERVICE_FOLDER: ${{ github.workspace }}/stacks/${{ inputs.stack }}/${{ inputs.service }}
          DOCKER_BUILDKIT: "1"
          COMPOSE_DOCKER_CLI_BUILD: "1"
        # To support local env files, we must explicitly create this env file here since these variables are NOT being passed in by the docker compose
        run: |
          echo "PACT_BROKER_BASE_URL=$PACT_BROKER_BASE_URL" >> ${SERVICE_FOLDER}/test/.env
          echo "PACTFLOW_TOKEN=$PACTFLOW_TOKEN" >> ${SERVICE_FOLDER}/test/.env
          echo "PACT_CONSUMER_BRANCH=$PACT_CONSUMER_BRANCH" >> ${SERVICE_FOLDER}/test/.env
          echo "PACT_CONSUMER_APP_VERSION=$PACT_CONSUMER_APP_VERSION" >> ${SERVICE_FOLDER}/test/.env
          make -sC "${SERVICE_FOLDER}" service_pact_consumer_test
          make -sC "${SERVICE_FOLDER}" pact_consumer_test_publish
        shell: sh
      - name: Force this job to run for can-i-merge to work in the provider
        if: inputs.service == 'normalizer'
        run: echo "Pacticipant ${{ inputs.stack }}-${{ inputs.service }} does not require consumer tests to run at this time."
        shell: sh

then later in the CI yaml file we have the

can-i-merge

job, which has a requirement that

pact-consumer-test

runs first:

pact-can-i-merge:    
needs:
      - pact-consumer-test

The problem is that we added a new provider, which is another service in the monorepo called

partner-custom-tasks

, which would skip the

pact-consumer-tests

job since this new provider service doesn't have any consumer tests. The fix was to amend the if statement in

pact-consumer-tests

with the new provider:

- name: Force this job to run for can-i-merge to work in the provider
        # If you're adding a new provider, and it doesn't have any consumer tests, then add it to the if statement here.
        if: (inputs.service == 'normalizer' || inputs.service == 'custom-tasks')
        run: echo "Pacticipant ${{ inputs.stack }}-${{ inputs.service }} is not a consumer, therefore does not require consumer tests to run at this time."
        shell: sh

tl;dr: managing consumers and providers in a monorepo in github actions is tricky because some services are consumers; some services are providers; and some services are both consumers and providers, and github actions doesn't have a great way to deal with the

needs

field in these cases.