Exploring basic GitHub Actions support

To work with GitHub Actions, you need a GitHub organization and admin access to your GitHub repository. You may choose to build your own repository from scratch or you can fork the book’s sample repository if you haven’t already. Now, you will have access to the Actions menu for your repo. The examples and screenshots in this section are taken from setting this up on the book repo.

GitHub supports multiple runners on a single repository. GitHub makes it simple enough to add a self-hosted runner, so let’s try that first. Here, GitHub will guide us to download the appropriate binary for our selected platform and architecture. macOS, Linux, and Windows are supported:

Figure 11.1 – GitHub guide for creating a self-hosted runner

GitHub currently distributes standard archives for Linux platforms without distribution packaging, so be careful which download you get. Make sure to use the latest...