Book Image

Automating Workflows with GitHub Actions

By : Priscila Heller
Book Image

Automating Workflows with GitHub Actions

By: Priscila Heller

Overview of this book

GitHub Actions is one of the most popular products that enables you to automate development tasks and improve your software development workflow. Automating Workflows with GitHub Actions uses real-world examples to help you automate everyday tasks and use your resources efficiently. This book takes a practical approach to helping you develop the skills needed to create complex YAML files to automate your daily tasks. You'll learn how to find and use existing workflows, allowing you to get started with GitHub Actions right away. Moving on, you'll discover complex concepts and practices such as self-hosted runners and writing workflow files that leverage other platforms such as Docker as well as programming languages such as Java and JavaScript. As you advance, you'll be able to write your own JavaScript, Docker, and composite run steps actions, and publish them in GitHub Marketplace! You'll also find instructions to migrate your existing CI/CD workflows into GitHub Actions from platforms like Travis CI and GitLab. Finally, you'll explore tools that'll help you stay informed of additions to GitHub Actions along with finding technical support and staying engaged with the community. By the end of this GitHub book, you'll have developed the skills and experience needed to build and maintain your own CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
1
Section 1:Introduction and Overview of Technologies Used with GitHub Actions
4
Section 2: Advanced Concepts and Hands-On Exercises to Create Actions
9
Section 3: Customizing Existing Actions, Migrations, and the Future of GitHub Actions

Understanding contexts, environment variables, and expressions

Some of the workflow examples we've shared throughout this book have included expressions, contexts, and environment variables. This section will provide more details about each.

Contexts

You can use contexts to access information about steps, workflow runs, jobs, and runner environments. Any time you want to access a context from within a workflow file, you need to use a syntax similar to ${{ <context-goes-here> }}. The following example shows how to access the steps context:

tag_name: ${{ steps.gets_project_name.outputs.project_name }}

Contexts can be used mostly anywhere in your workflow file. They are often used with expressions to check for specific conditions. The following example uses the if statement to validate the github context. In this case, the job will only run if the result of the expression is approved:

if: github.event_name == 'pull_request_review' && github...