Since they were introduced in late 2019, GitHub Actions have completely changed the ways in which developers handle workflow automation. GitHub Actions allow you to automate tedious repetitive workflows like installing dependencies (npm ci), running tests (npm test), scanning for vulnerabilities (npm audit) and deploying to a server.

Manual deployment should be a thing of the past. A lot of developers simply SSH into their servers, git pull and restart the app. This process is prone to run into a myriad of errors, though, not to mention the fact that it’s slow and repetitive. We can remedy that (for free!) with GitHub Actions.

You can think of an action as a third party library that you can insert somewhere in your pipeline to perform certain tasks. There’s an action for almost anything you can think of – from setting up NodeJs to sending text messages. Individual actions are used inside workflows.

Workflows are triggered by events. An event is almost anything that happens in your git repository – a push, commit, merge, etc. Essentially, any GitHub webhook event will trigger a workflow.

Finally, workflows run on separate Github-owned servers. These servers are referred to as runners. You can host your own runners, but GitHub’s hosted ones will do just fine for our purposes.

Let’s see this in action (no pun intended).

Creating a workflow

A workflow is a custom automated process consisting of jobs that are run in steps. Inside these steps, you can use actions or run bash commands within your package. This way, you can build, test, scan, package and deploy any project on Github.

A workflow is configured using YAML syntax and saved in the ‘.github/actions’ folder. The directory structure should look like this:

#node.js #github #github actions