Introduction

  • 2 minutes

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

Suppose you manage a team that's developing a web site that will improve your customers' experience when they contact product support. This project is important to upper management. They want a high-quality site, and they want to publish it soon. You need to make sure your team is producing code that tests, builds, and deploys quickly once a feature is implemented. On top of that, your IT department wants to automate creating and tearing down the project's infrastructure. You decide to use continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to automate all the build, test, and deployment tasks. You're also going to adopt infrastructure as code (IaC) to automate the IT tasks.

There are several tools available to help you achieve these goals. However, because you're already using GitHub for your code repository, you decide to investigate GitHub Actions to see if it provides the automation you need.

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

Learning objectives

In this module, you'll:

  • Learn what GitHub Actions are, the types of actions, and where to find them.
  • Identify the required components within a GitHub Actions workflow file.
  • Plan the automation of your software-development lifecycle with GitHub Actions workflows.
  • Create a container action and have it run in a workflow that's triggered by a push event to your GitHub repository.

Prerequisites