CI/CD: GitHub Actions
Waheed Iqbal
MLOps
Department of Data Science, FCIT, University of the Punjab
Lahore, Pakistan
CI/CD
● CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (or Continuous
Delivery). It's a set of practices and tools that streamline the software development and
delivery process.
● CI/CD emphasizes automation at every stage of the software development lifecycle, from
code integration and testing to deployment and monitoring.
● Automated testing is a critical part of CI/CD, with various types of tests (unit, integration,
regression, etc.) running continuously to detect bugs and ensure code quality.
● In a CD pipeline, tested and approved code changes are automatically deployed to
production or a staging environment without manual intervention.
CI/CD Tools
● Jenkins: One of the most widely used open-source CI/CD tools. It offers extensive plugin support, enabling integration
with a variety of tools and platforms.
● Travis CI: It is a cloud-based CI/CD service that is commonly used for open-source projects hosted on GitHub.
● CircleCI: Cloud-native CI/CD platform that automates the software development pipeline. It offers parallelism and
containerization for faster builds and testing.
● GitLab CI/CD: GitLab CI/CD is integrated into the GitLab platform, providing a seamless experience for source code
management, CI/CD, and container registry. It is well-suited for organizations using GitLab for version control.
● GitHub Actions: GitHub Actions is tightly integrated with GitHub repositories, allowing developers to automate
workflows and CI/CD pipelines directly within GitHub. It supports a wide range of programming languages and
platforms.
● There many others too!
GitHub Actions
● GitHub's automation platform.
● Enables Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) directly within your
GitHub repository.
● Comprises workflows, triggered by specific events, which contain jobs made up of steps.
GitHub Actions
● GitHub Actions live in .yml or .yaml files in the
.github/workflows/ directory of your
repository.
●
● Example:
○ Create a .github/workflows/main.yml file in your
repository.
GitHub Actions: Workflow
A workflow is a set of automated steps that define how
your code should be built, tested, and deployed. You
can create multiple workflows for different purposes,
like CI, CD, code analysis, etc.
A GitHub Actions workflow YAML file typically has the
following structure:
1. Name: The name of the workflow.
2. Triggers: Events that trigger the workflow.
3. Jobs: A set of jobs to execute, each job contains
steps.
4. Steps: Individual steps in a job, such as running
commands or using actions.
GitHub Actions: Workflow Trigger
● Workflows can be triggered by various GitHub events.
Example:
● push: Runs the workflow on every push to the repository.
● pull_request: Runs the workflow on every pull request to the repository.
GitHub Actions: Defining Job
● Workflows can have one or many jobs.
● Jobs run on virtual hosts (runners) provided by GitHub.
GitHub Actions: Steps in Job
● Each job contains a sequence of tasks called steps.
● Steps can be commands or actions.
GitHub Actions: Environment Variables
● GitHub sets several environment variables for use in workflows.
Example:
● Print the current repository name:
GitHub Actions: Deploying
● Automate deployment tasks using workflows.
Example
● Deploying to GitHub Pages:
Example Demo
name: GitHub Actions Demo
run-name: ${{ github.actor }} is testing out GitHub Actions 🚀
on: [push]
jobs:
Explore-GitHub-Actions:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- run: echo " 🎉 The job was automatically triggered by a ${{ github.event_name }} event."
- run: echo " 🐧 This job is now running on a ${{ runner.os }} server hosted by GitHub!"
- run: echo " 🔎 The name of your branch is ${{ github.ref }} and your repository is ${{ github.repository }}."
- name: Check out repository code
uses: actions/checkout@v4
- run: echo " 💡 The ${{ github.repository }} repository has been cloned to the runner."
- run: echo " 🖥 The workflow is now ready to test your code on the runner."
- name: List files in the repository
run: |
ls ${{ github.workspace }}
- run: echo " 🍏 This job's status is ${{ job.status }}."
More Examples
https://spacelift.io/blog/github-actions-tutorial
https://codefresh.io/learn/github-actions/github-actions-tutorial-and-examples/
