From the course: Advanced GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions review - GitHub Tutorial

From the course: Advanced GitHub Actions

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GitHub Actions review

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- [Narrator] GitHub Actions is an automation framework that integrates seamlessly with code stored in a GitHub repository. You can use actions to automate many parts of the software development life cycle, including continuous integration and deployment. Just to make sure we're on the same page, let's review some keywords that you need to know. Let's start with a workflow. Workflows define how all the automation in a process is tied together, including how the process gets started. For a workflow to be recognized by GitHub Actions, it must be stored inside your repo, in the .GitHub/workflows directory. Workflows are also coded using YML syntax. Events are the triggers that start a workflow. Events can be just about anything that happens while you're using GitHub, pushes to a repo, new pool requests, new issues, and so on. Workflows can even be triggered by manual events in the web interface. Honestly, the variety of events that are available to us as automators is one of the key features provided by GitHub Actions. Runners define the compute layer where jobs are executed. GitHub actions provides runners with popular operating systems, like Ubuntu, Windows and Mac OS. You can even use your own self-hosted runner if your jobs need a more specific environment. Each workflow contains one or more jobs. Jobs are high-level tasks that define one or more steps that need to be run for the job to complete. The actual work done by a job takes place in steps. Steps are simple commands, shell scripts, or they can be actions. Actions help speed up your workflow development by bundling programs, run times, and all of their dependencies into Docker containers or JavaScript modules. Actions are useful for running common tasks in a repeatable fashion without having to write the same code over and over again. Now that we're familiar with what GitHub Actions is and some of the parts of it, let's dive into some advanced workflows.

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