GitHub Actions gives us a way to manage CI pipelines in one logical place to improve developer workflows and increase efficiency.
GitHub workflows live in the root directory under .github/workflows/ and use YAML syntax.
These two branches show different ways we can use GH Actions:
-
end- This branch only runs tests for specific directories that have changes in PRs opened against it. For example, a change to one of the components or changing a single page. To test out, create a new PR against this branch and you will see only the tests running for the specific files you edited. -
end-all-tests- This branch runs all tests for every PR opened against it. To test out, create a new PR against this branch and you will see that all of the tests are ran.
# Name of the workflow as it appears in the Actions
# tab of the gh repo
name: <workflow-name>
# Specify the event(s) in which you want to trigger
on: [push]
# jobs group all the jobs that will run in this workflow
jobs:
<job-name>:
# Configure the machine to run the workflow on
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
# Groups all the steps under this job name
steps:
# This action checks out your repo and downloads it to the runner
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- run: npm install && npm testWorkflows - Automated procedure made up of one or more jobs to be triggered and ran by an event.
Events - Activity that triggers a workflow. Can be scheduled, manual, or through a webhook thats fired when a PR is opened for example. A list of all events can be found here
Jobs - Set of steps to execute on a runner by a workflow. Multiple jobs run concurrently by default. Can be found in the docs here
Steps - Task that runs commands inside of a runner. Every step within the same job uses the same runner. Can be found in the docs here
Actions - Standalone commands combined into steps to create a job. Each line within steps is an individual action. More information can be found in the docs here
Runners - Server that runs our tests. You can use self hosted runners, but gh provides its own for MacOS, Windows, and Ubuntu. A list of GH hosted runners can be found here
Artifacts - Data that is persisted after a workflow is complete. The data can be shared among other jobs within the same workflow. See the docs for more information here
Annotations - Used with GitHub Apps. You use the Checks API to run checks against code changes and the output will be put here. Not really useful for us. See more here