GitHub Actions optimizes code delivery time, from idea to deployment, on a community-powered platform.

Suppose you lead a team developing a website designed to improve your customers’ experience when they contact product support. This project is important to management. They want a high-quality site published quickly. You need to ensure your team produces code that is tested, compiled, and deployed rapidly as soon as a feature is implemented. In addition, your IT department wants to automate the creation and deletion of the project infrastructure. Therefore, you decide to use continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to automate all build, test, and deployment tasks. You also adopt infrastructure as code (IaC) to automate IT tasks.

Several tools can help you achieve these goals. However, since you already use GitHub as your code repository, you decide to explore GitHub Actions to see if it provides the automation you need.

In this module, you will be introduced to GitHub Actions and workflows. In the following modules, you will use what you learn here to implement continuous integration, continuous delivery, and infrastructure as code.

Learning objectives

In this module, you will:

• Discover what GitHub Actions are, the types of actions available, and where to find them.
• Identify the necessary components in a GitHub Actions workflow file.
• Plan the automation of your software development cycle with GitHub Actions workflows.
• Create a container-based action and run it in a workflow triggered by a push event on your GitHub repository.

Prerequisites

• A GitHub account
• Ability to navigate and edit files on GitHub
  (For more information about GitHub, see [Introduction to GitHub].)