GitHub Actions in Action

Automate your build, test, and deploy pipelines using GitHub Actions!

Continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines help you automate the software development process and maximize your team’s efficiency. GitHub Actions in Action teaches you how to build, test, and deploy pipelines in GitHub Actions through hands-on labs and projects.

In GitHub Actions in Action you will learn how to:

• Create and share GitHub Actions workflows
• Automate CI/CD workloads and other GitHub tasks
• Secure release pipelines with secrets, variables, and environments
• Support compliance frameworks
• Create safe and scalable self-hosted runners

Written by three Microsoft MVPs and tech reviewed by a Staff DevOps Architect from GitHub, this book delivers the hardworking skills and advice you’ll need to be successful on the job. DevOps engineers will love GitHub Actions in Action’s coverage of reliable methods for Infrastructure-as-Code and automating cloud environments. You’ll follow an extended example application for selling tickets, taking it all the way from initial build to cloud deployment.

Foreword by Scott Hanselman.

About the technology

Believe it or not, CI/CD can be simple! With GitHub Actions, you can automate your entire dev process using just the tools built into GitHub—no external frameworks or complex integrations required. GitHub Actions is secure, reliable, and best of all, easy. This book will get you started.

About the book

GitHub Actions in Action teaches you how to build automated delivery pipelines in GitHub. You’ll start with simple examples that demonstrate workflow and action basics, and then you’ll dive into platform architecture, security, and workflow runtime details. As you go, you’ll build a full CI/CD pipeline, optimizing for compliance, performance, and costs. You’ll even create shareable actions for the GitHub marketplace.

What's inside

• Create and share GitHub Actions workflows
• Automate testing and other GitHub tasks
• Secure release pipelines with secrets, variables, and environments

About the reader

For developers and DevOps engineers comfortable with GitHub.

About the author

Michael Kaufmann is a Microsoft Regional Director and MVP. Rob Bos is an Azure and GitHub Trainer, a Microsoft MVP, a GitHub Star, and a LinkedIn Learning Instructor. Marcel de Vries is a CTO of Xebia Microsoft Services, Microsoft Regional Director, and MVP.

The technical editor on this book was James Michael Gousset.

Table of Contents

Part 1
1 Introduction to GitHub Actions
2 Hands-on: My first Actions workflow
3 Workflows
4 GitHub Actions
Part 2
5 Runners
6 Self-hosted runners
7 Managing your self-hosted runners
Part 3
8 Continuous integration
9 Continuous delivery
10 Security
11 Compliance
12 Improving workflow performance and costs