Quickstart for GitHub Actions

Introduction

GitHub Actions is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that allows you to automate your build, test, and deployment pipeline. You can create workflows that run tests whenever you push a change to your repository, or that deploy merged pull requests to production.

This quickstart guide shows you how to use the user interface of GitHub to add a workflow that demonstrates some of the essential features of GitHub Actions.

To get started with preconfigured workflows, browse through the list of templates in the actions/starter-workflows repository. For more information, see Using workflow templates.

For an overview of GitHub Actions workflows, see About workflows. If you want to learn about the various components that make up GitHub Actions, see Understanding GitHub Actions.

Using workflow templates

GitHub provides preconfigured workflow templates that you can use as-is or customize to create your own workflow. GitHub analyzes your code and shows you workflow templates that might be useful for your repository. For example, if your repository contains Node.js code, you'll see suggestions for Node.js projects.

These workflow templates are designed to help you get up and running quickly, offering a range of configurations such as:

• CI: Continuous Integration workflows
• Deployments: Deployment workflows
• Automation: Automating workflows
• Code Scanning: Code Scanning workflows
• Pages: Pages workflows

Use these workflows as a starting place to build your custom workflow or use them as-is. You can browse the full list of workflow templates in the actions/starter-workflows repository. For more information, see Using workflow templates.

Prerequisites

This guide assumes that:

• You have at least a basic knowledge of how to use GitHub. If you don't, you'll find it helpful to read some of the articles in the documentation for repositories and pull requests first. For example, see Quickstart for repositories, About branches, and About pull requests.

• You have a repository on GitHub where you can add files.

• You have access to GitHub Actions.

  Note

  If the Actions tab is not displayed under the name of your repository on GitHub, it may be because Actions is disabled for the repository. For more information, see Managing GitHub Actions settings for a repository.

Creating your first workflow

1. In your repository on GitHub, create a workflow file called github-actions-demo.yml in the .github/workflows directory. To do this:

   • If the .github/workflows directory already exists, navigate to that directory on GitHub, click Add file, then click Create new file, and name the file github-actions-demo.yml.

   • If your repository doesn't have a .github/workflows directory, go to the main page of the repository on GitHub, click Add file, then click Create new file, and name the file .github/workflows/github-actions-demo.yml. This creates the .github and workflows directories and the github-actions-demo.yml file in a single step.

   Note

   For GitHub to discover any GitHub Actions workflows in your repository, you must save the workflow files in a directory called .github/workflows.

   You can give the workflow file any name you like, but you must use .yml or .yaml as the file name extension. YAML is a markup language that's commonly used for configuration files.

2. Copy the following YAML contents into the github-actions-demo.yml file:

   YAML

   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