Learning GitHub Actions: Event-Driven Automation for Your Codebase

Course details

GitHub Actions is a continuous integration tool that allows developers to automate tasks for their software projects. In this course, learn how to use this powerful tool to create workflows triggered by events, implement continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, and develop custom actions. Instructor Michael Jenkins shows you how to get started with actions and the workflows that run them. He also demonstrates how to use actions from the GitHub Marketplace and public repositories, leverage the capabilities of GitHub Actions to support your CI/CD workflow, and plan and develop custom actions.

Concepts

Introduction

From push to deploy - GitHub Actions made simple
Working with YAML files
Your first action
Workflow and action attributes

Actions and Workflows

Create a workflow
Add jobs and steps to a workflow
Add actions to a workflow
Run a workflow
Add dependencies between jobs
Specify branches for workflow events
Workflow and action limits
Solution - Develop a multi-job workflow

Selecting and Using Actions

Use an action from the GitHub Marketplace
Use an action from a repository
Pass arguments to an action
Use environment variables
Use secrets
Create and use artifacts
Solution - Develop a workflow that creates artifacts

Developing a CI CD Workflow

Plan your CI CD pipeline
Linting and unit tests
Building and managing artifacts
Testing with artifacts
Deploying
Add a workflow status badge
Solution - Develop a CI CD pipeline for a Python script

Developing Custom Actions

Plan a custom action
Your custom action objective
Dockerfile review
Add a Dockerfile
Add an entry-point script
Use runtime environment resources
Test an action locally
Add a metadata file
Add a README file
Deploy a custom action
Publish an action to the GitHub Marketplace
Solution - Create a custom action

Conclusion

Additional resources for GitHub Actions