Step-by-step articles on GitHub Actions, part of our Delivery collection.
Showing 10 articles
GitHub Actions runs automated workflows when things happen in your repository: a push, a pull request, a schedule or a manual click. The most common first use is CI: run tests on every change. Anatomy of a workflow Workflow - a YAML file in .github/workflows/...
Installing dependencies is often the slowest part of a CI run. Caching downloads between runs can cut minutes from every workflow. The easy way: built into setup actions - uses: actions/setup-node@v4 with: node-version: 22 cache: npm # also: yarn, pnpm - uses:...
A matrix runs the same job with different combinations of values: several Node.js versions, operating systems or database versions, in parallel. A basic matrix jobs: test: runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }} strategy: matrix: os: [ubuntu-latest, windows-latest, macos-la...
Workflows need configuration (URLs, flags) and credentials (API keys, deploy tokens). GitHub provides separate tools for each, plus environments to control who and what can deploy where. Secrets and variables Secrets are encrypted, masked in logs and not reada...
Storing cloud access keys as GitHub secrets works, but those keys live forever and can leak. With OpenID Connect (OIDC) , GitHub gives each workflow run a signed token, and your cloud exchanges it for temporary credentials. There are no keys to steal or rotate...
When ten repositories have nearly identical CI files, every improvement must be made ten times. GitHub Actions offers two ways to share. Composite actions: share a group of steps # .github/actions/setup-app/action.yml name: Set up app description: Install Node...
A common pipeline: every push to main builds an image, tags it with the commit and pushes it to a registry, ready to deploy. The workflow name: Docker image on: push: branches: [main] tags: ['v*'] permissions: contents: read packages: write # push to ghcr.io j...
CI pipelines hold deploy credentials and write access to your code, which makes them attractive targets. These practices close the most common holes. 1. Least-privilege GITHUB_TOKEN permissions: contents: read # default for the whole workflow jobs: release: pe...
A CI pipeline that takes 25 minutes slows down every pull request. Most pipelines can be made several times faster with a few changes. 1. Cancel outdated runs concurrency: group: ci-${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.ref }} cancel-in-progress: true When you pus...
Releasing by hand (build, write notes, upload files) is slow and easy to get wrong. A tag-triggered workflow does it the same way every time. Trigger on version tags # .github/workflows/release.yml name: Release on: push: tags: ['v*.*.*'] permissions: contents...
