Using Github Actions for Continuous Integration
This dummy repo is supposed to show how to get started with Github actions if you want to use it for continuous integration (CI) in your projects. Below are some links to the relevant pages where you can learn more about the topic and find more example code.
Learning Github Actions
Suppose we have a python script Experiment.py on which the team is working in the repo
and for which some unit tests have been written in Experiment_test.py. In order to make sure
that the script is still working whenever some changes are pushed we want Github to
run the tests automatically and tell us if some of the tests failed.
If we are working in a bigger team where the developers have to make pull requests from different branches, we might want to require that Github runs the tests on the new branch before we can even merge the pr.
The main addition to our repo is a .yaml or .yml file that should be put
in a separate directory .github/workflows.
Github has a good tutorial, look no further than here
https://docs.github.com/en/actions/quickstart
and here
https://docs.github.com/en/actions/learn-github-actions/introduction-to-github-actions
Actions for Python
The support for python in Github actions is pretty good and setting it up is relatively straightforward. The basics can be found here
https://docs.github.com/en/actions/guides/building-and-testing-python
or here
https://docs.github.com/en/actions/guides/building-and-testing-nodejs-or-python?langId=py
If you are using some special version of python that is not the default of your runner, you can install it like this: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/setup-python
I really recommend working through the guide and make good use of features like caching dependencies to reduce the runtime of your workflows etc.
Actions for Java
Things are tiny bit more complicated here due to all the different versions of java out there. To be continued if some groups want to write their project in java and use Github actions...