https://github.com/features/actions
Microsoft's GitHub Actions is a powerful automation platform that is built-in to, and integrated with GitHub. With a Yaml-based syntax, it is similar to IBM's (RedHat) Ansible automation platform or others like Microsoft's Azure DevOps Pipelines, Amazon AWS CodePipeline, Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLabCI etc... It allow you to automate build, test, and deployment processes within your code repository; defining workflows using YAML files and utilizing different runner environments to execute tasks.
While GitHub's hosted runners only include 'windows-latest', 'macos-latest' and Ubuntu Linux[1], you can use a Docker Image inside Ubuntu to evaluate your action on a different flavor of Linux like Debian[2].
From Zero to Hero in 90 Minutes
Davide "CoderDave" Benvegnu can take you from zero to hero in 90 minutes as he covers most of the fundamentals of GitHub Actions.
Examples
The Semantic MediaWiki project has a good example of using GitHub Actions. See the main workflow at https://github.com/SemanticMediaWiki/SemanticMediaWiki/blob/master/.github/workflows/main.yml
Advanced Debugging
A cool advanced tool for debugging your GitHub Actions automation is https://github.com/nektos/act which allows you to run GitHub actions locally.
References
- ↑ https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-github-hosted-runners/using-github-hosted-runners/about-github-hosted-runners#standard-github-hosted-runners-for-public-repositories
- ↑
A snippet like this in your action will build the named image in the Ubuntu runner.
runs-on: ubuntu-latest container: image: rockylinux/rockylinux:9
