GitHub Actions

Introduction

GitHub Actions allows for the automation of tasks within your software development life cycle. Through GitHub actions users can automatically run their software testing scripts.

Key Vocabulary

Workflows

Workflows can be used to design, test, package, release, or deploy a project on GitHub. A workflow can be added to a repository in GitHub using the file name .github/workflows. Workflows consist of one or more jobs that are scheduled/triggered by an event.

Events

Events are the activities that trigger the start of a workflow. Workflows can be triggered using pus or pull requests.

Runners

Runners can be hosted by GitHub or own on your own and is basically considered as a server that has GitHub Actions runner application installed. A runner runs one job at a time and reports the progress to GitHub.

Jobs

A job is a sequence of instructions that run on the same runner. A workflow containing multiple jobs will perform them in parallel by default. You may also set up a pipeline to conduct jobs in a specific order.

Steps

A step is a single task that can be used to execute commands in a job. An action or a shell command can be used as a step. Each step of a task runs on the same runner, allowing all of the activities in that job to exchange data.

Actions

Actions are commands that are used to join steps to create a job. Actions can be created or found on the GitHub community.

Figure credit: GitHub Docs The components of GitHub Actions that work together to run jobs