front matter

foreword

With the introduction of GitHub Actions, the GitHub universe has quickly expanded from a place that we go to get open source code to one where we build, create, and release open source binary artifacts. It is truly the hub where our coding adventures begin. This book that Michael, Marcel, and Rob have written together here is a brilliant introduction to not just GitHub Actions but the larger GitHub ecosystem.

In this book, the authors will walk you through a complete understanding of how GitHub Actions can be utilized and how surprisingly powerful it is. Certainly, Actions can build source code, and it is a fantastic tool for continuous integration and continuous deployment. But you’ll soon realize that Actions is far more than just a build tool—it’s actually an incredibly capable and complete automation platform you can use to run automations and workflows of any kind!

You might think a book like this is just for the most advanced and senior engineers. However, what they’ve put together is a gentle introduction that will take you from a complete beginner to an advanced GitHub Actions connoisseur. I love that the book includes real-world examples. I especially enjoyed how much I learned about self-hosted runners that allow you to run your own Actions environments on your own locally supported systems. These runners are open source and a testament to the GitHub ecosystem and how it all snaps together.

By the end, you will have expanded your understanding of how Actions works, you’ll have written and deployed your own workflows and actions, and you might even have set up your own self-hosted runners. You’ll have a secure and compliant continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline that you can implement not only at work but also on your own personal projects and (ideally!) you’ll be able to help open source teams take their workflows to the next level.

I hope you enjoy reading GitHub Actions in Action as much as I did. Welcome to open source!

—Scott Hanselman, vice president developer community, Microsoft

preface

In our opinion, GitHub Actions is the best workflow solution for continuous delivery and all kinds of automation—and it is disrupting the market. With AI-assisted development, like GitHub Copilot, it is more important than ever to automate manual tasks in engineering to participate in the enormous productivity gains that can be achieved.

We give GitHub Actions training and boot camps around the globe, and we often find that people are already using GitHub Actions but that they started it in a trial-and-error fashion without really learning. This can be done, as GitHub Actions is quite easy to use, and the documentation is good—but it is not optimal. Learning how GitHub actions work and the best practices for using them is a much simpler approach that will save a lot of time and frustration, as there is normally a simple way to achieve great results.

We also realized that all other books out there either cover the basics or cover some parts of automation but not the full end-to-end story in a simple and ready-to-use form. This realization sparked the idea for the book to provide a comprehensive guide that covers the basics, explains why things work the way they do by explaining the underlying technology, and gives practical guidance on using the tool for real-world continuous delivery scenarios.

We use Azure and .NET as illustrative examples in our examples in part 3 because they are commonly used and easy to understand. However, the principles can easily be applied to other languages and cloud platforms as well.

acknowledgments

We would like to thank everybody involved in the process of publishing this book: our editors at Manning for being always so patient, Jonathan Gennick for always bringing everything back on track, our technical reviewers for the great feedback, and the readers that took the time to provide their feedback in the early access program. A special thanks goes to Doug Rudder, for always supporting us and providing so much valuable feedback, and our technical editor, Mickey Gousset, a Staff DevOps Architect on the GitHub FastTrack team, who is also an international speaker, a published author, and also runs a YouTube channel focused on GitHub.

To all the reviewers, your suggestions helped make this a better book. Thank you, Aleksandar Nikolic, Alessandro Campeis, Allan Makura, Bobby Lin, Craig Treptow, Francis Edwards, Giuliano Latini, Giuseppe Maxia, Glen Yu, Hariskumar Panakkal, Henry Stamerjohann, Jakub Morawski, Jan Vinterberg, Jasmeet Singh, Jon Humphrey, José Alberto Reyes Quevedo, Leonardo Taccari, Marcus Geselle, Mario-Leander Reimer, Paul Zuradzki, Peter Sellars, Sally K. Tsung, Sandeep Manchella, Seungjin Kim, Sriram Macharla, Steve Goodman, Sumit Singh, and William Jamir Silva.

about this book

GitHub Actions is the workflow engine of GitHub. With over 15,000 actions in the marketplace, it is a big ecosystem that allows you to automate everything. You can use it to build and test software for any platform and deploy it to any cloud—but you can also use it to automate everything in your software delivery process, from ChatOps to IssueOps to GitOps.

GitHub Actions is a lightweight, pipeline-as-code (YAML) workflow engine that is optimized for easy sharing of functionality and that allows easy integration for partners. This book provides guidance and insights on how to use GitHub Actions, an integral part of GitHub, to ensure a secure and compliant software delivery process without the need of additional tools.

Who should read this book?

This book is for software engineers who want to streamline their work or the software delivery process with automation to deliver new features faster and make the process less error prone. It is also relevant for DevOps engineers who want to automate infrastructure and configuration as code for all kinds of cloud environments.

This book caters to beginners just learning about GitHub Actions and advanced users with plenty of experience. We also dive into the GitHub Actions runtime, show the differences between GitHub-hosted and self-hosted runners, and configure self-hosted runners as either a single runner or scaling up with GitHub’s recommended solution. We expect readers to have some basic programming skills to understand the simple code examples we use in the book as well as a basic knowledge of Git and GitHub.

How this book is organized: A roadmap

This book has 12 chapters and is divided into three parts. In part 1, you will learn the basics of GitHub Actions through some simple, hands-on exercises that will prepare you for the more complex, in-depth, and practical examples in part 3.

Part 2 explains the GitHub Actions runtime. When you finish this part of the book, you will know all about the runtime for GitHub Actions.

Part 3 shows a practical way to use GitHub actions to implement CI/CD. When you finish this part, you will be able to build a fully secure and compliant CI/CD process that is fully automated, using GitHub actions.

About the code

This book contains many examples of source code both in numbered listings and in line with normal text. In both cases, source code is formatted in a fixed-width font like this to separate it from ordinary text. Sometimes code is also in bold to highlight code that has changed from previous steps in the chapter, such as when a new feature adds to an existing line of code.

In many cases, the original source code has been reformatted; we’ve added line breaks and reworked indentation to accommodate the available page space in the book. In rare cases, even this was not enough, and listings include line-continuation markers (➥). Additionally, comments in the source code have often been removed from the listings when the code is described in the text. Code annotations accompany many of the listings, highlighting important concepts.

You can get executable snippets of code from the liveBook (online) version of this book at https://livebook.manning.com/book/github-actions-in-action. The complete code for the examples in the book is available for download from the Manning website at www.manning.com and from the book’s GitHub repository at https://github.com/GitHubActionsInAction/. Links to the correct repositories are in the README on the front page.

liveBook discussion forum

Purchase of GitHub Actions in Action includes free access to liveBook, Manning’s online reading platform. Using liveBook’s exclusive discussion features, you can attach comments to the book globally or to specific sections or paragraphs. It’s a snap to make notes for yourself, ask and answer technical questions, and receive help from the authors and other users. To access the forum, go to https://livebook.manning.com/book/github-actions-in-action/discussion. You can also learn more about Manning’s forums and the rules of conduct at https://livebook.manning.com/discussion.

Manning’s commitment to our readers is to provide a venue where a meaningful dialogue between individual readers and between readers and the authors can take place. It is not a commitment to any specific amount of participation on the part of the authors, whose contribution to the forum remains voluntary (and unpaid). We suggest you try asking the authors some challenging questions lest their interest stray! The forum and the archives of previous discussions will be accessible from the publisher’s website for as long as the book is in print.

about the authors

Michael Kaufmann believes developers and engineers can be happy and productive at work. He loves DevOps, GitHub, Azure, and modern software engineering. Microsoft has awarded him the titles Microsoft regional director (RD) and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP)—the latter in the category of DevOps and GitHub. Michael is also the founder and managing director of Xebia Germany. He shares his knowledge in books and training and is a frequent speaker at international conferences.

Rob Bos strongly focuses on ALM and DevOps, automating manual tasks and helping teams deliver value to the end user faster, using DevOps techniques. This is applied to anything Rob comes across, whether it’s an application, infrastructure, or a serverless or training environment. A lot of his focus goes to GitHub and GitHub Actions, improving the security of applications and DevOps pipelines. He regularly shares his knowledge through blog posts, online videos, and international conferences, like Techorama and GitHub Universe. Rob is a trainer (Azure and GitHub), a Microsoft MVP, and a LinkedIn learning instructor.

Marcel de Vries is the cofounder and global managing director and chief technology officer of the Xebia Microsoft service line, a company that is driving the DevOps way of work in software delivery. He has a passion for technology and empowers organizations to drive innovation and productivity. Marcel always focused on application lifecycle management, even before the platforms that supported this entered the market. He spends a lot of his time helping organizations implement DevOps practices, using platforms like Azure DevOps and now GitHub. Marcel is a frequently requested public speaker at well-known industry events, such as Microsoft Build, Microsoft Ignite, Visual Studio Live!, and Techorama, to name a few. As a Microsoft MVP for over 17 years consecutively and a Microsoft regional director since 2008, you can always contact him to talk about subjects like cloud adoption strategies, business development, DevOps, cloud computing, microservices, containers, IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Marcel is also the author of many courses on DevOps, cloud-native software development, and testing for Pluralsight.

about the cover illustration

The figure on the cover of GitHub Actions in Action is captioned “Trompetadgi, musicien turc, jouant la trompette,” or “Trompetadgi, Turkish musician, playing the trumpet,” taken from the collection Illustrations of Ottomans circa 1790, provided by the British Museum. Each illustration is finely drawn and colored by hand.

In those days, it was easy to identify where people lived and what their trade or station in life was just by their dress. Manning celebrates the inventiveness and initiative of the computer business with book covers based on the rich diversity of regional culture centuries ago, brought back to life by pictures from collections such as this one.