GitHub Actions Workflows
GitHub is more than just a platform for hosting and sharing code. With millions of developers from all over the world collaborating on projects of every type and size, it has become the beating heart of the open source community. Since its foundation in 2008, GitHub has grown to host over 200 million repositories and 100 million users, with a staggering 3.5 billion contributions made in the last year alone. With GitHub Actions, engineers and developers can now automate all kinds of workflows and repetitive engineering tasks – from Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) to IssueOps, automatic issue triaging, and ChatOps. GitHub Actions is much more than just a CI/CD tool – it’s a comprehensive automation platform that can help streamline your entire development workflow.
This book will show you how to make the most of GitHub Actions in your day-to-day life. It is a practical book – so you will do as much as possible, and I will explain the theory alongside the individual recipes.
In this chapter, you will learn the basics of workflows in GitHub: workflow files, the workflow and YAML syntax, events that trigger workflows, expressions, secrets, and environments, and you will write your first workflows.
We’re going to cover the following main topics in this chapter:
- The GitHub ecosystem
- Hosting and pricing for GitHub
- Pricing for GitHub Actions
- GitHub Marketplace
- Using the workflow editor for writing workflows
- Using secrets and variables
- Creating and using environments
