What is Github Actions ?
Accoring to Github, GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging work the way you want.
So, it is a tool which is used to apply continuous integration and continuous deployment, made for github.
But wait, what is CI/CD ? 🤔
CI/CD is a method to frequently deliver apps to customers by introducing automation into the stages of software development like testing, writing code, deployment etc.
The above picture is about dev-ops which increases an organization's ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity. We can see Jenkins in it which is also a tool used for CI/CD.
Some similar tools like Github actions used in industry:
- Jenkins
- Travis CI
- Circle CI
and much more..
This is a simple project in which we have used node js,express js, jest and supertest.
Node js & Express for making the server run & Jest and Supertest for testing the application.
We have written a simple test in the ./tests/app.test.js which just tests the expected output from the server.
Our ./app.js file is server code which returns JSON at the route GET /.
Then we have github actions workflow file at the loaction ./github/workflows/nodejs_tests.js which has to be made for using github actions.
Everything related to github actions is described in it what needs to be done when. Checkout that file, I have added comments so that you can understand well.
SOME GITHUB ACTIONS TERMS DESCRIBED
1. Workflow : Configurable automated process used to run one or more jobs (it is a yaml file)
2. Events : Events are triggered then the process we defined run. Like on : pull_request this means when the repo gets a pull request this workflow will get triggered and run after that event. There are many events like on : push , schedule something like cron-job etc. Read more in documentation.
3. Jobs : A workflow consists of one or more jobs. Each job run in its own environment ( Windows, Linux ..)
4. Steps : Steps are individual tasks within a job, they can include action (pre-built tasks by github or third party)
5. Actions : Actions are reusuable units of code which encapsulate a task.
You can watch a youtube tutorial on github actions to understand more and read documentation.
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