01.0_actions-intro.md

Introduction to GitHub Actions {docsify-ignore-all}

Actions

Actions are sharable individual tasks that perform units of work. These units of work can do a multitude of things ranging from thanking new contributors to deploying your application to a cloud provider.

Actions can be defined in multiple places:

• Directly in your repository
• In an open sourced public repository
• GitHub Marketplace

Workflows

You can have one action in a workflow or combine multiple actions for a more complex workflow. These custom workflows become the automated processes used in your repository.

When a workflow is triggered by a defined GitHub event, the action then executes and you're provided with real-time logging right inside your GitHub repository!

Workflows must be defined inside the .github/workflows directory of a repository.

Example:

# This ENTIRE file is a workflow
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # This is an action, defined in an open source repository
      - name: Checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v2

      # This is also an action, defined directly inside this repository
      - name: Hello World action
        uses: ./.github/actions/hello-world-action