GitHub Actions Cookbook: A practical guide to automating repetitive tasks and streamlining your development process

Authored by a Microsoft Regional Director, this book shows you how to leverage the power of the community-driven GitHub Actions workflow platform to automate repetitive engineering tasks

Key Features

• Automate CI/CD workflows and deploy securely to cloud providers like Azure, AWS, or GCP using OpenID
• Create your own custom actions with Docker, JavaScript programming, or shell scripts and share them with others
• Discover ways to automate complex scenarios beyond the basic ones documented in GitHub

Book Description

Say goodbye to tedious tasks! GitHub Actions is a powerful workflow engine that automates everything in the GitHub ecosystem, letting you focus on what matters most.

This book explains the GitHub Actions workflow syntax, the different kinds of actions, and how GitHub-hosted and self-hosted workflow runners work. You’ll get tips on how to author and debug GitHub Actions and workflows with Visual Studio Code (VS Code), run them locally, and leverage the power of GitHub Copilot. The book uses hands-on examples to walk you through real-world use cases that will help you automate the entire release process. You’ll cover everything, from automating the generation of release notes to building and testing your software and deploying securely to Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Google Cloud using OpenID Connect (OIDC), secrets, variables, environments, and approval checks.

The book goes beyond CI/CD by demonstrating recipes to execute IssueOps and automate other repetitive tasks using the GitHub CLI, GitHub APIs and SDKs, and GitHub Token. You’ll learn how to build your own actions and reusable workflows to share building blocks with the community or within your organization.

By the end of this GitHub book, you'll have gained the skills you need to automate tasks and work with remarkable efficiency and agility.

What you will learn

• Author and debug GitHub Actions workflows with VS Code and Copilot
• Run your workflows on GitHub-provided VMs (Linux, Windows, and macOS) or host your own runners in your infrastructure
• Understand how to secure your workflows with GitHub Actions
• Boost your productivity by automating workflows using GitHub's powerful tools, such as the CLI, APIs, SDKs, and access tokens
• Deploy to any cloud and platform in a secure and reliable way with staged or ring-based deployments

Who this book is for

This book is for anyone looking for a practical approach to learning GitHub Actions, regardless of their experience level. Whether you're a software developer, a DevOps engineer, anyone who has already experimented with Actions, or someone completely new to CI/CD tools like Jenkins or Azure Pipelines, you’ll find expert insights in this book. Basic knowledge of using Git and command lines is a must.

Table of Contents

1. GitHub Actions Workflows
2. Authoring and Debugging Workflows
3. Building GitHub Actions
4. The Workflow Runtime
5. Automate Tasks in GitHub with GitHub Actions
6. Building and Validating Your Code
7. Release Your Software with GitHub Actions

Michael Kaufmann believes that developers and engineers can be happy and productive at work. He loves DevOps, GitHub, Azure, and modern work. Microsoft has awarded him with the title Microsoft Regional Director (RD) and Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) – the latter in the category of DevOps and GitHub. Michael is also the founder and managing director of Xebia Microsoft Services, Germany – a consulting company that helps its customers become digital leaders by supporting them in their cloud, DevOps, and digital transformation. Michael shares his knowledge in books, training, and as a frequent speaker at international conferences.