What are actions?

  • 2 minutes

Actions are the mechanism used to provide workflow automation within the GitHub environment.

They're often used to build continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) solutions.

However, they can be used for a wide variety of tasks:

  • Automated testing.
  • Automatically responding to new issues, mentions.
  • Triggering code reviews.
  • Handling pull requests.
  • Branch management.

They're defined in YAML and stay within GitHub repositories.

Actions are executed on "runners," either hosted by GitHub or self-hosted.

Contributed actions can be found in the GitHub Marketplace. See Marketplace Actions.