GitHub Workflows are automated jobs that can be triggered by various events against a GitHub repository. They are pretty awesome.<\/p>\n
GitHub Actions are a way to encapsulate configuration and functionality in a way that can be easily reused in GitHub Workflows.<\/p>\n
I was thinking it’d be fun to create some GitHub Actions (yes, I’m the life of the party), so I sat down a few mornings ago to do this. I was shocked at how easy it was.<\/p>\n
I followed a few lines of this tutorial<\/a> to create a workflow<\/a>. Then I created an action<\/a> by following this tutorial<\/a>. Finally, I edited my workflow to use the new action. That was it.<\/p>\n It was amazingly simple and took me about 30 minutes. I ran into one unrelated issue (to set the executable bit on a shell script in windows, I had to modify the shell script contents in order to ensure the change was sent to the remote repo).<\/p>\n If you take a look, you’ll see these are both toy repositories, to be sure. However, the ability to write jobs which will be executed on a git push, pull request or other events<\/a> is great and removes toil. Being able to extract common functionality to an action is even better. Finally, the ability to share the action publicly by adding it to the GitHub marketplace<\/a> is fantastic.<\/p>\n I’ve liked CircleCI for a long time<\/a>, but if I were them I’d be worried.<\/p>\n