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Discussion on: Announcing the GitHub Actions Hackathon on DEV!

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Bogdan Covrig

From GitHub Actions Documentation:

While both GitHub Actions and GitHub Apps provide ways to build automation and workflow tools, they each have strengths that make them useful in different ways.

GitHub Apps:

  • Run persistently and can react to events quickly.
  • Work great when persistent data is needed.
  • Work best with API requests that aren't time consuming.
  • Run on a server or compute infrastructure that you provide.

GitHub Actions:

  • Provide automation that can perform continuous integration and continuous deployment.
  • Can run directly on runner machines or in Docker containers.
  • Can include access to a clone of your repository, enabling deployment and publishing tools, code formatters, and command line tools to access your code.
  • Don't require you to deploy code or serve an app.
  • Have a simple interface to create and use secrets, which enables actions to interact with third-party services without needing to store the credentials of the person using the action.