Github Actions

Costs Involved

Free Model

• Gitub Actions is free in the following cases
  • The repositories you use with actions are public
  • The systems you execute action on are your own rather than GitHub provided ones

Paid Model

• Applicable for Private repositories
• There are two types of items you pay for Github Actions
  • Storage
  • Minutes
• Github Actions Plans

Plan	storage	minutes (per month)
Github Free	500 MB	2000
Github Pro	1 GB	3000
Github Team	2 GB	3000
Github Enterprise Cloud	50 GB	50000

• Minute multipliers
  • OS
    • Linux => 1
    • Windows => 2
    • macOs => 10
• Refer Here for pricing and Refer Here for feature comparision

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Actions Flow Overview

• At a highlevel
  • Some triggering event happens in a GitHub Repository
  • A dedicated directory in the repository (.github/workflows) is searched for workflow that is configured to respond to an trigger event
  • Corresponding workflows are identified and runs are triggered
• Workflow is a key element over here (which is a CI/CD pipeline) which is coded in YAML format
• Workflows have a specific syntax
• A workflow contains one or more jobs. Each job can be simple or complex, once the workflow is kicked of it begins executing on a runner (machine on which Github actions execute)

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Triggering Workflows

• Event Triggers Workflows
• An event can be defined in several ways
  • A person does some operation on Github Repository
  • A matching external trigger happens (an Event from outside of Github)
  • A schedule is setup to run a workflow
  • A workflow is initiated manually
• The workflow can respond to a single event such as when a push happens

on: push

• workflow can respond to multiple events

on:
  - push
  - pull_request

• Workflow can respond to multiple event types with qualifiers such as branches, tags or file paths

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main
      - rel/v*
    tags:
      - v1.*
      - beta
    paths:
      - '**.ts'

• Workflow can execute on a specific interval

on:
  scheduled:
    - cron: '30 22 * * *'

• Workflow can respond to specific manual events or Comments on Github issues
• Refer Here for triggering

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Components

Steps

• these are basic unit of executions
• They consist sof either invocations of predefined action or a shell command to be run on a runner
• Any shell command are executed via run clause & any predefined action are pulled via uses clauses

steps:
  - uses: actions/checkout@v3
  - run: echo helloworld

Runners

• These are physical or virtual machines or containers where code workflow is executed.
• They can be system provided by you (Selfhosted runners) or hosted by Github
• we define with a simple runs-on clause

runs-on: ubuntu-latest

Jobs

• Jobs aggregate steps and define which runner to execute them on

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - run: mvn clean package

Workflow

• A workflow is like a pipeline

name: Simple java build
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - run: mvn clean package

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Figure out manual steps to

1. build and run unit tests of java applications
2. build and run unit tests of .net applications
3. build and run unit tests of reactjs/angularjs applications
4. build docker images

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Building Java Applications

• To build java applications, we have two major options
  • gradle
  • maven

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Building dotnet core applications

• Ensure dotnet core sdk is installed
• while building dotnet code we have two configurations
  • Debug : used for dev environments
  • Release: used for testing and production environments
• dotnet comes with
  • build
  • test
  • package

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Developer Environment setup for Github Actions

• Install Github actions extension on vscode