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

Summary

Excellent work! Now that you have completed Chapter 4, Working with Self-Hosted Runners, you have discovered how self-hosted runners can add flexibility and customization to your workflows. By hosting your own runner application, you can build a hosting machine and pick hardware and software that are not available for GitHub-hosted runners.

You walked through the steps of installing and configuring the runner application in your host machine.

You also revisited a workflow that previously used a GitHub-hosted runner, and recreated the job using a self-hosted runner. You practiced adding a self-hosted runner in a workflow by simply using the right key and the right labels: runs-on: [self-hosted, macOS, dev-runner].

Finally, you reviewed the contents of runner and job log files, while learning how to manage and maintain self-hosted runners.

Learning about self-hosted runners gives you the flexibility to try any of the workflow examples throughout this book in your...