GitHub Actions: Key Elements & First Simple Workflow

Prior Knowledge: Git & GitHub basics.

What is GitHub Actions?

GitHub Actions is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that allows you to automate your build, test, and deployment pipeline. You can create workflows that build and test every pull request to your repository, or deploy merged pull requests to production.

from https://docs.github.com/en/actions/learn-github-actions/understanding-github-actions

We will explore the key elements you must understand when working with GitHub Actions: Workflow, Job, and Step. Besides that, we will quickly create a simple workflow on the GitHub.

Workflows	Jobs	Steps
Attach to a GitHub repository	Have a Runner	Execute a shell script
Contain one or more Jobs	Contain one or more Steps	Can use custom or 3rd party actions
Triggered upon Events	Run in parallel (default) or sequential	Steps are executed in order
	Can be conditional	Can be conditional

The First Workflow

I will access my GitHub account, and create a new public repository named gha-demo, add a README file in there.

After creating, we will land on the screen like this:

We want to create the first action by clicking on the Actions tab. Now, we can start to create the first workflow. We'll start with the Simple workflow.

After clicking on the Configure button, it will display the content of a YAML file, we'll then rename it to first-action.yml.

You can get rid of the entire content of the first-action.yml, we will start from scratch that we fully understand.

Here's the first simple workflow:

name: First workflow #The name of the workflow
on: workflow_dispatch #on: when the wf should be executed, workflow_dispatch means we can manually trigger this workflow
jobs:
  first-job:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest #set up runners
    steps:
      - name: Print greeting
        run: echo "Welcome to GitHub Actions"
      - name: Print goodbye
        run: echo "Bye bye!"

Commit the changes, and manually trigger the workflow:

Next Topic: GitHub Actions: Working with a ReactJs app