What are GitHub's actions and how to use them?

What are GitHub's actions and how to use them?

Recently I was working on building a simple blackjack game using Javascript. After I completed it, I straightly uploaded it on GitHub. I saw tons of people contributing to my repository of the blackjack game. I thought there must be a system to greet those who are making the project better. So, I used Github Actions to do the same with the help of it, I can circulate messages that I want to all those lovely people who are contributing to the project. Now you might be wondering what GitHub action is so let's find out.

So technically, GitHub Actions is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that allows you to automate your build, test, and deployment pipeline. You can create workflows that build and test every pull request to your repository or deploy merged pull requests to production.
Let’s try to break this jargon into simple understanding. GitHub action is a platform to automate developer flows. We talk about such developer flows when we are concerning our thoughts about Pull Request, an issue created in a setup, PR merge, etc. To Automate these, we use GitHub action (this is one of the many issues solved by GitHub Actions). What Github Actions do is they Listen to an event say a PR, or an issue or a PR merge or so, and respond to such actions (Trigger Workflow). For example, for an issue, a GitHub action might sort it or label it or assign it to someone else. Let us discuss more what CI/CD pipeline is

cicd-pipeline-1024x355.png

CI/CD pipeline in simple words is a process through which developers can commit changes, test, build and finally deploy a product at a single stage. Let us understand this through an example if I want to build a Docker image and push it without the help of GitHub, I will need to download a different server to deploy it but with GitHub actions, I can have access to all at a single stage.

Screenshot (638).png

As you can clearly see tons of deployment services are available through GitHub actions

The more you use GitHub Actions the more you will be comfortable with it. Thanks for reading and I am sharing some resources to do check out Till then SEE a <3

Resources

  1. youtu.be/F3wZTDmHCFA
  2. youtube.com/watch?v=rgxbeIvQj0Q&t=4s 3.docs.github.com/en/actions/learn-github-act..
  3. GitHub Actions Tutorial - Basic Concepts and CI/CD Pipeline with Docker