Blog 0-SP21

What is Github Actions?

Github Actions is essentially a platform to automate development workflows. When researching this topic, I’ve come to realise that Github Actions is not just a CI/CD Pipeline tool, it automates many other developer workflows, but it’s definitely best known for the CI/CD Pipeline use. What kind of workflows? Good question, and to simply answer it any workflow that is tedious and time consuming. Github Actions work in a way so whenever something happens in or to you project repository, a Github Event is triggered. Events like a pull request, issue & errors in code, a new contributor joining in, etc, all are considered an event. Then a preset action is executed as a response to the event. To break it down even further, you listen to an event, then an automatic workflow is triggered. Actions like, sort, label, assign, etc.

CI/CD Pipeline with Github Actions

Probably one of the most common use cases for Github Actions, is the wonderful CI/CD Pipeline. You commit you code, test it, build the code into something, push that thing into storage, then deploys the thing you made on deployment server. There are many CI/CD pipeline-esque tools, but Github Actions is easily compatible with your repository. The actual setup of the pipeline, in considered to be more easy. I’ve never done it, but I will for my project so wish me luck :). In the real world, developer use this tool so that they dont have to hire a developer to simply manage the pipeline. Woah the robots are replacing the developers now! It’s greatest strength is integration with multiple tools, and combination uses.

How It Works (explained by someone who hasn’t done it themselves… yet)

From what I’ve seen on the interwebs, this that you create actions within your repositories, with a textfile or two, call workflows. These workflows automate common build tasks. Then actions are used to compress images, test code, push to the host. This is done by creating a series of YAML files, stored in the .github workflows folder in your repo, that contain a series of actions that determine your flow in the repo. More info in the next blog…

• Cidney Marbella