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

Templates and reusable workflow repositories

GitHub’s reusable workflows and templates allow you to create and share standardized configurations and workflows across multiple repositories within an organization. They promote best practices, consistency, and efficiency in your projects by providing pre-defined templates for common tasks and scenarios. Let’s look at each feature in more detail in the following sections.

Reusable workflows

Reusable workflows are a GitHub Actions feature that enables you to create a workflow in one repository and use it as a reference in other repositories. This eliminates the need to duplicate workflow configurations across multiple repositories, making maintaining and updating workflows easier.

To create a reusable workflow, you define a workflow with the necessary steps and configuration in one repository, and then use the uses keyword in other repositories to reference that workflow. When a workflow run is triggered in the referencing...