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

Debugging techniques for workflows

The debugging capabilities in workflows could be better. However, they are not nonexistent; there are some tools available, some handy debugging actions, and some useful environment variables to use when debugging. The first one we’ll jump into is the act tool, which helps you manage your workflows.

act workflow debugging tool

If the prerequisites and the installation of the tool were successful, you should be able to go into the root directory of a repository cloned previously that has been authenticated with the account that the Personal Access Token (PAT) was created under, and type the following command, which will list all the workflows in that repository:

 gh act -l

This will give you a view similar to that in the following screenshot:

Figure 3.16 – Successful run of act on a repo

Figure 3.16 – Successful run of act on a repo

If you receive an error, verify that your Docker daemon is running on the installed Docker Desktop. Docker has...