Github Actions
GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging work the way you want. Automate, customize, and execute your software development workflows right in your repository with GitHub Actions.
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Understanding GitHub Actions
Learn the basics of GitHub Actions, including core concepts and essential terminology.
Overview
GitHub Actions is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that allows you to automate your build, test, and deployment pipeline. You can create workflows that build and test every pull request to your repository, or deploy merged pull requests to production.
GitHub Actions goes beyond just DevOps and lets you run workflows when other events happen in your repository. For example, you can run a workflow to automatically add the appropriate labels whenever someone creates a new issue in your repository.
GitHub provides Linux, Windows, and macOS virtual machines to run your workflows, or you can host your own self-hosted runners in your own data center or cloud infrastructure.
The components of GitHub Actions
You can configure a GitHub Actions workflow to be triggered when an event occurs in your repository, such as a pull request being opened or an issue being created. Your workflow contains one or more jobs which can run in sequential order or in parallel. Each job will run inside its own virtual machine runner, or inside a container, and has one or more steps that either run a script that you define or run an action, which is a reusable extension that can simplify your workflow.
Workflow overview
A workflow is a configurable automated process that will run one or more jobs. Workflows are defined by a YAML file checked in to your repository and will run when triggered by an event in your repository, or they can be triggered manually, or at a defined schedule.
Workflows are defined in the .github/workflows directory in a repository, and a repository can have multiple workflows, each of which can perform a different set of tasks.
Your first GitHub action looks like this:
code
main.yml name: CI
on: [push]
jobs: build:
Events
An event is a specific activity in a repository that triggers a workflow run. For example, activity can originate from GitHub when someone creates a pull request, opens an issue, or pushes a commit to a repository. You can also trigger a workflow run on a schedule, by posting to a REST API, or manually
Jobs
A job is a set of steps in a workflow that execute on the same runner. Each step is either a shell script that will be executed, or an action that will be run. Steps are executed in order and are dependent on each other. Since each step is executed on the same runner, you can share data from one step to another. For example, you can have a step that builds your application followed by a step that tests the application that was built. jobs: firebase-deploy:
Actions
An action is a custom application for the GitHub Actions platform that performs a complex but frequently repeated task. Use an action to help reduce the amount of repetitive code that you write in your workflow files. An action can pull your git repository from GitHub, set up the correct toolchain for your build environment, or set up the authentication to your cloud provider.
Create an example workflow
GitHub Actions uses YAML syntax to define the workflow. Each workflow is stored as a separate YAML file in your code repository, in a directory named .github/workflows.
You can create an example workflow in your repository that automatically triggers a series of commands whenever code is pushed. In this workflow, GitHub Actions checks out the pushed code, installs the bats testing framework, and runs a basic command to output the bats version: bats -v.
In your repository, create the .github/workflows/ directory to store your workflow files.
In the .github/workflows/ directory, create a new file called learn-github-actions.yml and add the following code. ##code name: learn-github-actions on: [push] jobs: check-bats-version: runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v3- uses: actions/setup-node@v3with:node-version: '14'- run: npm install -g bats- run: bats -vCommit these changes and push them to your GitHub repository.
Your new GitHub Actions workflow file is now installed in your repository and will run automatically each time someone pushes a change to the repository.