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

Creating a Docker container action

The next few pages will walk you through the creation of a Docker container action. Although basic Docker knowledge will be helpful in understanding parts of this section, the main goal is to provide you with knowledge needed to create an action from scratch. Focus on Docker itself will be minimal.

Once you are done reading this section, you will be able to create a Docker container action and verify that it works as intended by using it in a workflow.

Prerequisites

To follow the steps presented in this section, you will need the following:

  1. A new GitHub repository. Throughout this section, the talktopri/a-docker-action repository will be used.
  2. A local copy of your GitHub repository. Use the git clone command to clone your GitHub repository to your workstation. Revisit Chapter 1, Learning the Foundations for GitHub Actions, if you need more details on how to accomplish that.

    The following screenshot shows the GitHub repository being...