GitHub Actions

In this episode, we are talking all about GitHub Actions. What are they, and why should you consider learning more about them? Also, Allen terminates the terminators, Outlaw remembers the good ol' days, and Joe tries his hand at sales.

See the full show notes at https://www.codingblocks.net/episode218

News

• Thanks for the reviews! iTunes: nononeveragain, JoeRecursionjoe, Viv-or-vyv, theoriginalniklas
• Leave us a review if you have a chance! (/reviews)
• Allen did some work on his computer:
  • DeepCool LT720 Liquid Cooler (amazon)
  • Noctua Dual-Tower CPU Cooler (amazon)

What are GitHub Actions?

• GitHub Actions is a CI/CD platform launched in 2018 that lets you define and automate workflows
• It's well integrated into Github.com and fits nicely with git paradigms - repository, branches, tags, pull requests, hashes, immutability (episode 195)
• The workflows can run on GitHub-hosted virtual machines, or on your own servers
• GitHub Actions are free for standard Github runners in public repositories and self-hosted runners, private repositories get a certain amount of "free" minutes and any overages are controlled by your spending limits
  • 2000 minutes and 500MB for free, 3000 minutes and 1Gb for Pro, etc (docs.github.com)
• Examples of things you can do
  • Automate builds and releases whenever a branch is changed
  • Run tests or linters automatically on pull requests
  • Automatically create or assign Issues, or labels to issues
  • Publish changes to your gh-pages, wiki, releases,
• Check out the "Actions" tab on any github repository to check if a repository has anything setup (github.com)
• The "Actions" in GitHub Actions refers to the most atomic action that takes place - and we'll get there, but let us start from the top

Workflows

• Workflow is the highest level concept, you see any workflows that a repository has set up (learn.microsoft.com)
• A workflow is triggered by an event: push, pull request, issue being opened, manual action, api call, scheduled event, etc (learn.microsoft.com)
• TypeScript examples:
  • CI - Runs linting, checking, builds, and publishes changes for all supported versions of Node on pull request or push to main or release-* branches
  • Close Issues - Looks for stale issues and closes them with a message (using gh!)
  • Code Scanning - Runs CodeQL checks on pull