How do GitHub Actions work?

Most straightforward explanation wins 🤪

Comments

[Jake Wesorick]

Triggered by an event related to activity on GitHub, open up a virtual machine and have it do something. Possibilities are endless but include building, testing, deploying, and posting GIFs.

[Mike Coutermarsh]

I'm on the Actions team at GitHub, and this is a great description. Especially the part about GIFs.

[Elliot Derhay]

That's a good idea. Deploy a new version, generate a post on Twitter with a GIF. 🙃

[Tierney Cyren]

If you use the Twitter Together GitHub Action, you could simply PR a .tweet file and then use the automerge Action to merge it if the build passes (which it should!) :)

[Waylon Walker]

It can even interact with non-code portions of your repo like comments and issues.

[Keff]

And you can download artifacts generated by the action, I haven't found any use cases for myself but it's kinda cool to have!

[Nelson Estevão]

Maybe compile a PDF from LaTeX and download it.

[Hoang Le]

It is a great and shorted description. But i think using containers will speed up provision time

[Davide Santangelo]

Are just enhanced webhooks :D. Anyway, they are a huge help to increase automation and aid continuous delivery efforts.

[Julio Lozovei]

Event-based webhooks designed to automate your project's workflows - from issues tracking to deployments. Aaaaand, it's free for open source software.

Basically, a world-class CI/CD inside your repo.

[Taufik Nurrohman]

It’s just some do_action('push') stuff within the GitHub’s WordPress site environment.

We then do some add_action('push', function() {}) stuff to listen to the push event through our WordPress plugin for GitHub.

🤐

[drewmullen]

Not an explanation but here's a bunch of working examples different action workflows! github.com/drewmullen/actions-play...

[Daniel Gregory]

An action is triggered by an event. An event is and interaction with your repo on github. It’s like saying “Hey GitHub, when this thing happens can you do some stuff for me?” The ‘stuff’ is the set of instructions that you would like completing. An example would be to deploy when a commit is added on the master branch.

[Chathula Sampath]

commit -> event fired-> go through github action workflow file -> check the rules -> do the job

Github runs the job on runner you have mentioned like linux, mac or windows.

[Adrien Gallouët]

There's nothing straightforward than an example, the last one I wrote: github.com/angt/secret/blob/master...

[Aaron Schlesinger]

GitHub has webhooks for tons of things that happen to your repo. GitHub actions lets you run whatever code you want (like unit tests!), to respond to any of those webhooks.

Your code runs on GitHub's servers and you can get status updates on whether your code passed or failed

[Corentin Bettiol]

Start a computer in the cloud each time [an action] is executed.