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

Configuring a job that runs on a self-hosted runner

Similarly to GitHub-hosted runners, self-hosted runners use the runs-on key within a workflow file. Therefore, you will use a line like the following one in your .yml file:

runs-on: [self-hosted, macOS, dev-runner] 

Self-hosted runners automatically receive a self-hosted label, as well as a label to indicate the operating system and architecture you selected when you were creating a self-hosted runner on your repository's Settings page. In the previous example, macOS is the label automatically generated for the operating system. An architecture label is not being used in this case. Note how dev-runner, a label created using the ./config.sh script, was also used.

The following example is of a workflow used in Chapter 3, A Closer Look at Workflows, to translate issues and issue comments that were written in a language different from English, and this workflow ran on a GitHub-hosted runner. The following code snippet shows...