Learning GitHub Actions

Chapter 4. Working with Workflows

As I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, workflows are at the heart of using GitHub Actions. I’ve covered a number of the basics for understanding workflows. But you also need to be able to easily create, run, and monitor them for success/failure. This chapter will focus on those kinds of activities.

First, I’ll survey some of the features that GitHub provides for creating workflows from starter ones. Then I’ll show you how to edit workflows in the GitHub interface and how to drive changes in that same interface with operations like commits and pull requests. Along the way, you’ll learn how to navigate through the results of workflow runs and how to monitor the execution of a workflow.

Finally, I’ll show you how to use the updated GitHub Actions VS Code extensions to create and edit workflows, as well as how to manage and monitor your runs, from within Visual Studio Code (VS Code).

First up is a guide to creating an initial workflow in a repository.

Creating the First Workflow in a Repository

Suppose you have a repository where you haven’t been using GitHub Actions and you want to start. How do you get started? To begin, let’s look at a simple project example in GitHub. Figure 4-1 shows a basic repository with a couple of files.

Figure 4-1. Simple project in GitHub

If you click the Actions tab in the top menu in a repository without existing workflows, ...