The Complete GitHub Actions & Workflows Guide

GitHub recently released "GitHub Actions" , a CI service competitor to services like TravisCI and CircleCI. GitHub Actions however has the edge of being natively integrated with your GitHub repository. In addition to that, thanks to GitHub's popularity; GitHub Actions has the advantage of having large ecosystem and community. Using GitHub Actions you will find a lot of official and community pre-made workflows and also the actions marketplace. In the actions marketplace you can find tons of actions which are reusable pieces of code that you can use in your workflows to perform certain tasks like deploying code, interacting with API's, sending SMS's, etc...

Learn everything you need to know in order to create GitHub workflows & Actions.

In this course we will comprehensively explore GitHub's CI service. We will learn what GitHub workflows & actions are. And we will discover everything we can do in a GitHub workflow including how to run commands, use actions, trigger workflows, build matrices, filter by branch and more. Then we will use what we learned to create a real-world example of a CI/CD workflow where we will test, build, deploy our code and more. And finally we will learn how to write custom actions and publish them on the marketplace so that other people can use it.

Let's take a look at what will be discussed in each section in more detail:

Section 1

In section 1 we will have a quick conceptual introduction to what workflows, actions, jobs, steps and other terms that we will see are. We will also learn about YAML which is the format used to write workflows in GitHub. Then we will start writing our workflow and take a look at basic things like writing commands, using different shells and using actions including the most common action which is the checkout action.

Section 2

In section 2 we will get a bit deeper and learn different ways that we can use in order to trigger a workflow to run. This includes GitHub events like push and pull_request, cron schedules and also external events. We will also see how to make a workflow only run for certain branches, tags and directory paths.

Section 3

In this section we will see how can we use default environment variables and also how to add custom environment variables. We will also see how to encrypt environment variables that are sensitive and also how to encrypt and decrypt sensitive files that we don't won't to push to our repository. Moreover, we will see the GITHUB_TOKEN environment variable and how to use it for authentication. Also we will take a look at the context information that we can access in our workflows which contains a lot of information about our current workflow and virtual machine and more. Finally we will take a look at different functions that are available to use in our workflows.

Section 4

In section 4 we will see how can we setup matrices, a matrix is a way to run a job multiple times but using different environments. We will also learn how to use docker in our jobs and steps and how to run multiple docker services in our job.

Section 5

In section 5 we will finally use our knowledge to create a more real-world CI/CD example. We will set-up a repository where we have a web app and we need to have a flow for production and development deployment. So we will have 2 branches, 1 for production and another for development and we will write a workflow for each one of these branches to do certain things. These things will differ depending whether we are pushing on production or development branch. We will also have a workflow that will run if someone opened a pull request. The tasks we will perform includes: installing dependencies, caching, testing, checking code format, uploading artifacts, automatically generating a semantic version, deploying to production/staging, creating releases, opening issues, sending slack notifications and more.

Section 6

During the course we will use some actions that are available in the marketplace. In this section we will learn how to create our own actions. Actions can be created using JavaScript or using Docker. In this section we are going to learn about both ways and then we will create a JavaScript action that opens GitHub issues and a docker action that send a slack message which we will write using PHP.