Actions by GitHub

To quickly see GitHub Actions in action, check out the .github directory in the source code of this website here. You can see the following directory structure:

.github
├── dependabot.yml
└── workflows
    └── gh-pages.yaml

There is a .yaml or YAML (which stands for YAML Ain’t Markup Language) file that defines some workflow or a set of tasks that will be run on each event on the GitHub repository.

What is an event?

An event is a specific change made to your GitHub repository that should trigger your desired workflow. This event can be a new push, a new issue or a pull request made to the repository.

What is a workflow?

A set of automated tasks that are to be run of a specific event. A workflow is composed of several jobs and is defined in a YAML file such as specified above with gh-pages.yaml. This is how this file looks:

name: GitHub Pages

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main # Set a branch to deploy
  pull_request:

jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-20.04
    concurrency:
      group: ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.ref }}
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          submodules: true # Fetch Hugo themes (true OR recursive)
          fetch-depth: 1 # Fetch all history for .GitInfo and .Lastmod

      - name: Setup Hugo
        uses: peaceiris/actions-hugo@v2
        with:
          hugo-version: "latest"
          extended: true

      - name: Build
        run: git submodule update --init --recursive --depth 1 && npm i && hugo

      - name: Deploy
        uses: peaceiris/actions-gh-pages@v3
        if: ${{ github.ref == 'refs/heads/main' }}
        with:
          github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
          publish_dir: ./public

There are 2 keywords to focus on in this file - on and jobs. on is where you define the event/s that should trigger this workflow and jobs are the set of tasks that should execute as a part of the workflow.

Learn

GitHub Actions is a powerful tool to have in your development arsenal. Learn more from the official documentation.