Learning GitHub Actions: Automation and Integration of CI/CD with GitHub (Final)

Automate your software development processes with GitHub Actions, the continuous integration and continuous delivery platform that integrates seamlessly with GitHub. With this practical book, open source author, trainer, and DevOps director Brent Laster explains everything you need to know about using and getting value from GitHub Actions. You'll learn what actions and workflows are and how they can be used, created, and incorporated into your processes to simplify, standardize, and automate your work in GitHub.

This book explains the platform, components, use cases, implementation, and integration points of actions, so you can leverage them to provide the functionality and features needed in today's complex pipelines and software development processes. You'll learn how to design and implement automated workflows that respond to common events like pushes, pull requests, and review updates. You'll understand how to use the components of the GitHub Actions platform to gain maximum automation and benefit.

With this book, you will:

• Learn what GitHub Actions are, the various use cases for them, and how to incorporate them into your processes
• Understand GitHub Actions' structure, syntax, and semantics
• Automate processes and implement functionality
• Create your own custom actions with Docker, jаvascript, or shell approachesTroubleshoot and debug workflows that use actions
• Combine actions with GitHub APIs and other integration options
• Identify ways to securely implement workflows with GitHub Actions
• Understand how GitHub Actions compares to other options

Intended Audience:
This book is for anyone who is trying to learn more about GitHub Actions. If you’re picking this book up, you should already have a basic knowledge of Git and GitHub, and now you’re trying to figure out how to implement Actions into your workflow. You likely have some experience with solutions like Jenkins, Travis CI, and so on, and the automation platform and framework of GitHub Actions may improve your software development lifecycle process. You might be a software developer, SRE, DevOps engineer, or something else entirely, but it is my hope that the sections outlined above will provide a complete learning solution for GitHub Actions for all readers.

Although GitHub Actions is a sophisticated product, learning it doesn’t need to be complicated. Brent Laster has written an excellent book that relies on progressive disclosure, starting with the most basic concepts to get you up and running with GitHub Actions while also providing a comprehensive tour of GitHub Actions’ most advanced features to help you to optimize your use of the product as you adopt it across your organization. My team and I have been delighted to partner with Brent in ensuring that the content covered here is as current as possible. Whether you are new to CI/CD and starting with GitHub Actions as your first product in this space or are already a CI/CD expert and migrating from another tool, Brent’s book has the right balance of information to help you become productive quickly. We wish you the greatest success in automating your software delivery processes. - Julian C. Dunn, Senior Director of Product Management GitHub Actions