GitHub/Actions

https://github.com/features/actions

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 the Ansible automation platform or others like Azure DevOps Pipelines, Amazon AWS CodePipeline, Jenkins, CircleCI, and GitLabCI. 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 GitHubs 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