Book Image

Mastering GitHub Actions

By : Eric Chapman
Book Image

Mastering GitHub Actions

By: Eric Chapman

Overview of this book

Navigating GitHub Actions often leaves developers grappling with inefficiencies and collaboration bottlenecks. Mastering GitHub Actions offers solutions to these challenges, ensuring smoother software development. With 16 extensive chapters, this book simplifies GitHub Actions, walking you through its vast capabilities, from team and enterprise features to organization defaults, self-hosted runners, and monitoring tools. You’ll learn how to craft reusable workflows, design bespoke templates, publish actions, incorporate external services, and introduce enhanced security measures. Through hands-on examples, you’ll gain best-practice insights for team-based GitHub Actions workflows and discover strategies for maximizing organization accounts. Whether you’re a software engineer or a DevOps guru, by the end of this book, you'll be adept at amplifying productivity and leveraging automation's might to refine your development process.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1:Centralized Workflows to Assist with Governance
7
Part 2: Implementing Advanced Patterns within Actions
14
Part 3: Best Practices, Patterns, Tricks, and Tips Toolkit

Creating custom actions

In this section, we dive into the exciting world of creating a custom GitHub action that the entire developer organization can utilize. GitHub Actions provides a powerful automation platform, and by building our custom action, we can package our specific workflows into a reusable and shareable format. With this custom action, other developers can easily integrate it into their projects, streamlining their workflows and benefiting from our expertise.

What makes an action an action?

When we start creating an action, our starting position is to normally put it in an actions folder in the .github folder of the repo that’s using it. If we create them to be used across one of many reusable workflows in the same repository, we will put them in those reusable workflow repositories. If we wanted to share these actions with other users, we would create a repository just for the action.

In the Technical requirements section, I asked you to create a RichChecks...