Automating Workflows with GitHub Actions

Understanding 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.

Key Components

• Workflows: An automated process that you define in your repository. You create workflows by adding a YAML file to your .github/workflows directory.
• Events: An activity that triggers a workflow. For example, a workflow can be triggered when someone pushes code to a branch or opens a pull request.
• Jobs: A set of steps that execute on the same runner.
• Steps: An individual task that can run commands in your job. A step can be an action or a shell command.
• Actions: Standalone commands that are combined into steps to create a job. Actions are the smallest portable building block of a workflow. You can create your own actions, or use actions shared by the GitHub community.
• Runners: A server that has the GitHub Actions runner application installed. GitHub provides Ubuntu Linux, Microsoft Windows, and macOS runners.

GitHub Actions helps you build, test, and deploy applications on any platform, including Linux, macOS, and Windows.