Learning GitHub Actions

Chapter 1. The Basics

Welcome to Learning GitHub Actions. I’m excited that you’re here and for all that you’re about to learn. This is an amazing time to be working in the software field. From containers to clusters to clouds, from automation to generative AI, from security to SREs, the opportunities to create and contribute to interesting software projects has never been greater. And thanks to powerful platforms such as GitHub, that creation and contribution has never been easier to do.

GitHub has led the field in developing an ecosystem for managing the components of software and enabling collaboration, as witnessed by the vast number of open-source projects managed in its repositories. And it has continually provided additional value for users through enhancements to its interfaces, tracking contributions and issues, mechanisms to publish and share information, and much more.

For the last decade or slightly longer, creating software effectively has not just been about writing the code. It has been (and is) also about better and faster delivery technologies. The capabilities of continuous integration/continuous delivery (aka CI/CD), DevOps, and related practices are now largely taken for granted and easy to achieve. But historically with GitHub, you still needed to do some amount of integration with a separate tool to provide a delivery pipeline or other significant automation. While there have long been ways to bolt on extended CI/CD processes, GitHub has been missing a truly ...