Getting started with GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is a powerful tool that allows you to automate your software development workflows. With GitHub Actions, you can build, test, and deploy your code all from within GitHub. In this blog post, I’ll take you through the basics of GitHub Actions and show you how to get started with using it.

What is GitHub Actions?

GitHub Actions is a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) tool that is integrated with GitHub. It allows you to automate your software development workflows, from building and testing your code to deploying it to production. GitHub Actions uses YAML files to define your workflows, which makes it easy to configure and customise your automation.

How to get started with GitHub Actions

Create a GitHub repository

The first step is to create a new GitHub repository or use an existing one. To create a new repository, go to your GitHub account and click on the “New” button. Fill in the repository name and description, choose whether it should be public or private, and click on “Create repository”.

Create a new workflow

Once you have your repository set up, the next step is to create a new workflow. To do this, click on the “Actions” tab in your repository, and then click on the “New workflow” button. This will open up the workflow editor, where you can define your workflow using YAML.

Define your workflow

To define your workflow, you’ll need to create a YAML file in the “.github/workflows” directory of your repository. The file should have a name that ends with “.yml”, for example, “build.yml”. In this file, you’ll define the steps that make up your workflow.

Here’s an example of a simple workflow that builds and tests your code:

name: Build and Test
on: [push]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Build
      run: make build
    - name: Test
      run: make test

In this example, the workflow is triggered whenever there is a push event to the repository (see Events that trigger workflows for all of the workflow trigger events). It has one job called “build” that runs on an Ubuntu environment. The job consists of three steps: checking out the repository, building the code using the “make build” command, and testing the code using the “make test” command.

Run your workflow

Once you have defined your workflow, you can run it by clicking on the “Run workflow” button in the workflow editor. This will trigger the workflow and start running the steps defined in the YAML file. You can also view the progress of your workflow in the “Actions” tab of your repository.

Conclusion

GitHub Actions is a powerful tool that allows you to automate your software development workflows. With its YAML-based configuration, it’s easy to define and customise your workflows. Whether you’re building and testing your code or deploying it to production, GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate your development process. With this guide, you should now have a basic understanding of how to get started with GitHub Actions.