Understanding the basics of GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions are event-driven automation tasks that live within a GitHub repository. An event like a pull request can trigger a set of tasks to be executed. An example is a pull request triggering a set of tasks to clone the Git repository and execute go test to run Go tests.

GitHub Actions is extremely flexible, enabling developers to author a wide variety of automations, even some that you might not normally associate with a traditional continuous integration/release pipeline. Actions are also composable, enabling groups of tasks to be packaged together as a published action and used in workflows together with other actions.

In this section, you will learn about the components of a GitHub Action: workflows, events, context and expressions, jobs, steps, and actions. After you have been introduced to these components, we'll build and trigger our first GitHub Action.

Exploring the components of a GitHub Action

Understanding...