Automate your software development processes with GitHub Actions, the continuous integration and continuous delivery platform that integrates seamlessly with GitHub. With this practical book, open source author, trainer, and DevOps director Brent Laster explains everything you need to know about using and getting value from GitHub Actions. You'll learn what actions and workflows are and how they can be used, created, and incorporated into your processes to simplify, standardize, and automate your work in GitHub.

This book explains the platform, components, use cases, implementation, and integration points of actions, so you can leverage them to provide the functionality and features needed in today's complex pipelines and software development processes. You'll learn how to design and implement automated workflows that respond to common events like pushes, pull requests, and review updates. You'll understand how to use the components of the GitHub Actions platform to gain maximum automation and benefit.

With this book, you will:

• Learn what GitHub Actions are, the various use cases for them, and how to incorporate them into your processes
• Understand GitHub Actions' structure, syntax, and semantics
• Automate processes and implement functionality
• Create your own custom actions with Docker, JavaScript, or shell approaches
• Troubleshoot and debug workflows that use actions
• Combine actions with GitHub APIs and other integration options
• Identify ways to securely implement workflows with GitHub Actions
• Understand how GitHub Actions compares to other options

Table of Contents

Part I. Foundations

Chapter 1. The Basics

Chapter 2. How Does Act ions Work?

Chapter 3. What's in an act ion?

Chapter 4. Working with Workflows

Chapter 5. Runners

Part II. Building Blocks

Chapter 6. Managing Your Workflow Environments

Chapter 7. Managing Data Within Workflows

Chapter 8. Managing Workflow Execution

Part Ill. Security and Monitoring

Chapter 9. Act ions and Security

Chapter 10. Monitoring, Logging, and Debugging

Part IV. Advanced Topics

Chapter 11. Creating Custom act ions

Chapter 12. Advanced Workflows

Chapter 13. Advanced Workflow Techniques

Chapter 14. Migrating to GitHub Act ions

Intended Audience

This book is for anyone who is trying to learn more about GitHub Actions. If you’re picking this book up, you should already have a basic knowledge of Git and GitHub, and now you’re trying to figure out how to implement Actions into your workflow. You likely have some experience with solutions like Jenkins, Travis CI, and so on, and the automation platform and framework of GitHub Actions may improve your software development lifecycle process.

You might be a software developer, SRE, DevOps engineer, or something else entirely, but it is my hope that the sections outlined above will provide a complete learning solution for GitHub Actions for all readers. Here are some audiences that I had in mind while writing it and that I think can benefit from it:

• Those who are new (or newish) to GitHub and looking to understand how the automation component of it works
• Those who already understand the concepts and flow of GitHub Actions and want or need assistance with actually implementing the code and syntax for workflows
• Those who want to understand and evaluate GitHub Actions as a potential CI/CD/automation target
• Those who already have some experience with GitHub Actions and want to leverage it more fully for custom purposes
• Those who are working on implementing or have implemented GitHub Actions and need to make sure they do it securely
• Those who are responsible for, or want to, roll out GitHub Actions across a department, organization, or unit
• Those who are experienced GitHub users and want to migrate their current CI/CD solutions to GitHub Actions

If one of these fits your use case, I hope the book will provide you with the value you’re looking for. If you read it and have the opportunity, feedback is always welcome through reviews or interactions at future conferences or training venues.

About the Author

Brent Laster is an R&D DevOps director at SAS. He is a global trainer, author, and speaker on open source technologies. He's also the founder and president of Tech Skills Transformations, LLC, a company dedicated to making technology understandable and usable. Throughout his career in software development and management, Brent has always made time to learn and develop both technical and leadership skills and share them with others. He believes that regardless of the topic or technology, there's no substitute for the excitement and sense of potential that come from providing others with the knowledge they need to accomplish their goals.