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

Chapter 4: Working with Self-Hosted Runners

While GitHub offers the option to run jobs on GitHub-hosted runners, hosting your own runners can be an important advantage if your workflows demand highly customized environments.

In Chapter 3, A Closer Look at Workflows, you learned that GitHub Actions workflows can be as simple or as robust as you need them to be. You reviewed many examples of webhook events that trigger workflows, which illustrated how workflows can be used in the most diverse scenarios, such as translating issues or creating releases. Similarly, by using self-hosted runners, you can create virtual machines (VMs) or use hosts that will be as modest or as powerful as you need them to be while hosting the GitHub Actions runner application.

The skills you will learn in this chapter will allow you to understand the pros and cons of using a self-hosted runner when compared to using a GitHub-hosted runner. You will also see how to install the runner application, as...