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 a repository indexer

Currently, to utilize GitHub Pages on our current free plan, a repository must remain publicly visible unless you have an enterprise account, which we don’t. However, I’d advise against making it public for your specific needs unless you also intend to use Pages. Currently, GitHub doesn’t offer a feature on the free plan for private pages that’s easily accessible and simple to maintain compared to conventional web hosting. Yet, the solution to achieve our objective isn’t overly complicated. Let’s explore how to create a crawler that indexes repositories and evaluates their content:

  1. Our first step is to design a workflow for the indexer to do this. Design a workflow that does the following:
    • Runs on a set schedule
    • Can be manually triggered
  2. The workflow will collect data from all other repositories using the crawler pattern.
  3. Utilize the GitHub API to fetch repository information.
  4. Checkout the target...