GitHub Actions: Basics
In modern days developing softwares without a CI/CD pipeline is unthinkable. And if it can be tied up with your version control system then that is the power you can harness for good. It would save you a lot of times as those CI/CD platforms are managed and also literally have no setting up steps.
I have already used bit of Jenkins. At work, we are using GitLab CI heavily right now. So I really wanted to try out GitHub Actions now. In the following discussion I won’t be comparing any of the platforms rather I will go through the concepts of GitHub Actions. I will try to explain with keywords and building blocks of GitHub Actions with use case example and also try to run a simple workflow at the end of this blog.
From this point to the next I will simply write a git repository as repo for less typing. Sorry, if find it inconvenient.
What happens in GitHub Actions?
Let’s get graphical.
- Let’s say you have a GitHub repo. Any user with access to it can push, open a pull request or an issue, create a release and also many other things.
- Most of actions that is initiated by a user can be used as trigger to start a workflow.