Learning GitHub Actions

Chapter 12. Advanced Workflows

By this point in the book, you’ve seen many basic examples of workflows. Beyond the basics are several approaches for leveraging workflows that can greatly simplify repeated use. In this chapter, I’ll show you several ways you can leverage workflows to get additional flexibility and reuse.

In particular, I’ll cover implementation and use patterns for the following:

• Starter workflows
• Reusable workflows
• Required workflows

Creating Your Own Starter Workflows

Starter workflows were introduced in Chapter 1. As a reminder, starter workflows are basic workflow examples, tailored for a particular purpose, that anyone can use as initial code when you need to create a new workflow. As of the time of this writing, the ones provided with GitHub Actions fall into several categories:

Automation

Helpful code for doing automated processing such as handling pull requests

Continuous Integration

Monitoring code changes and initiating follow-on processes such as building and testing

Deployment

Using automation to publish and deploy software updates

Security

Adding security automation, such as code scanning, dependency review, etc., to your workflows

Pages

Automating deploying and packaging GitHub Pages sites using different technologies

More About Categories

Although only a few high-level categories may be shown when selecting starter workflows, there is a more extensive set of categories in the GitHub Actions repository.

These can be further refined with the ...