Practical GitHub Actions

For developer professionals, solving problems is a vital part of the job—particularly solving problems that keep coming up. GitHub Actions will let you automate your repetitive problems away, and in this course—created in partnership with GitHub—Ray Villalobos shows you how to set them up to tackle real-world projects. Ray starts with the basics of Actions, going over what you can do with them and how they work. He then shows you the steps necessary to publish a marketplace action, including creating a workflow, a generator repo Dockerfile, entry point, and action.yml file. Finally, Ray takes you through testing and releasing your GitHub Action.

If you’re a developer looking to advance your career, or a recent computer science grad searching for a developer role, check out this course to learn practical skills to add your portfolio and enhance your standing in a competitive job market.

Learning objectives

• Define what GitHub Actions are and explain their purpose.
• Demonstrate how to build and publish custom GitHub Actions.
• Use GitHub marketplace to find and integrate community-created actions.
• Outline the setup for hosting static websites using GitHub Pages.
• Create and configure a GitHub repository for automating tasks.
• Design a GitHub Action workflow that triggers on repository events.
• Create entry point scripts for Docker containers and manage execution permissions.
• Develop a modular setup for reusable actions across different repositories.
• Explain the role of Docker in running actions in the cloud.
• Formulate a Dockerfile to set up an environment for running Python scripts.