In this section, you will discover the basic components of a GitHub Actions workflow file.

The components of GitHub Actions

There are several components that work together to run tasks or jobs in a GitHub Actions workflow.
In summary:

• An event triggers the workflow,
• which contains one or more jobs,
• which use steps to define which actions will be executed.

To better understand how these components interact, let’s look at them one by one:

Workflow

A workflow is an automated process that you add to your repository.
It must contain at least one job and can be triggered by different events.
You can use it to build, test, package, publish, or deploy your repository’s project on GitHub.

Jobs

A job is the first major component of a workflow.
It is a section of the workflow associated with a runner.
This runner can be GitHub-hosted or self-hosted, and the job can run on a machine or inside a container.

You specify the runner with the runs-on attribute.

Steps

A step is an individual task that can run commands within a job.
In our previous example, the step uses the action actions/checkout@v2 to check out the repository.
What’s interesting is the value uses: ./action-a.
This is the path to the containerized action you will create in an action.yml file.

Actions

Actions in your workflow are standalone commands that are executed.
These commands can refer to:

• GitHub actions,
• your own custom actions,
• or community actions, like the one used in the previous example: actions/checkout@v2.