About workflows

About workflows

A workflow is a configurable automated process that will run one or more jobs. Workflows are defined by a YAML file checked in to your repository and will run when triggered by an event in your repository, or they can be triggered manually, or at a defined schedule.

Workflows are defined in the .github/workflows directory in a repository, and a repository can have multiple workflows, each of which can perform a different set of tasks. For example, you can have one workflow to build and test pull requests, another workflow to deploy your application every time a release is created, and still another workflow that adds a label every time someone opens a new issue.

Workflow basics

A workflow must contain the following basic components:

1. One or more events that will trigger the workflow.
2. One or more jobs, each of which will execute on a runner machine and run a series of one or more steps.
3. Each step can either run a script that you define or run an action, which is a reusable extension that can simplify your workflow.

For more information on these basic components, see "Understanding GitHub Actions."

Triggering a workflow

Workflow triggers are events that cause a workflow to run. These events can be:

• Events that occur in your workflow's repository
• Events that occur outside of GitHub Enterprise Server and trigger a repository_dispatch event on GitHub Enterprise Server
• Scheduled times
• Manual

For example, you can configure your workflow to run when a push is made to the default branch of your repository, when a release is created, or when an issue is opened.

For more information, see "Triggering a workflow", and for a full list of events, see "Events that trigger workflows."

Workflow syntax

Workflow are defined using YAML. For the full reference of the YAML syntax for authoring workflows, see "Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions."

Create an example workflow

GitHub Actions uses YAML syntax to define the workflow. Each workflow is stored as a separate YAML file in your code repository, in a directory named .github/workflows.

You can create an example workflow in your repository that automatically triggers a series of commands whenever code is pushed. In this workflow, GitHub Actions checks out the pushed code, installs the bats testing framework, and runs a basic command to output the bats version: bats -v.

1. In your repository, create the .github/workflows/ directory to store your workflow files.

2. In the .github/workflows/ directory, create a new file called learn-github-actions.yml and add the following code.

   YAML

   name: learn-github-actions
   on: [push]
   jobs:
     check-bats-version:
       runs-on: ubuntu-latest
       steps:
         - uses: actions/checkout@v2
         - uses: actions/setup-node@v2
           with:
             node-version: '14'
         - run: npm install -g bats
         - run: bats -v
   

3. Commit these changes and push them to your GitHub repository.

Your new GitHub Actions workflow file is now installed in your repository and will run automatically each time someone pushes a change to the repository. To see the details about a workflow's execution history, see "Viewing the activity for a workflow run."

Understanding the workflow file

To help you understand how YAML syntax is used to create a workflow file, this section explains each line of the introduction's example:

name: learn-github-actions