GitHub Actions Workflow

Table of Contents

• Overview
• When to Use
• Quick Start
• Reference Guides
• Best Practices

Overview

Create powerful GitHub Actions workflows to automate testing, building, security scanning, and deployment processes directly from your GitHub repository.

When to Use

• Continuous integration and testing
• Build automation
• Security scanning and analysis
• Dependency updates
• Automated deployments
• Release management
• Code quality checks

Quick Start

Minimal working example:

# .github/workflows/ci.yml
name: CI/CD Pipeline

on:
  push:
    branches: [main, develop]
  pull_request:
    branches: [main, develop]

env:
  REGISTRY: ghcr.io
  IMAGE_NAME: ${{ github.repository }}

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    strategy:
      matrix:
        node-version: [16.x, 18.x, 20.x]
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Setup Node ${{ matrix.node-version }}
        uses: actions/setup-node@v3
        with:
// ... (see reference guides for full implementation)

Reference Guides

Detailed implementations in the references/ directory:

Guide	Contents
Complete CI/CD Workflow	Complete CI/CD Workflow
Automated Release Workflow	Automated Release Workflow
Docker Build and Push	Docker Build and Push

Best Practices

✅ DO

• Use caching for dependencies (npm, pip, Maven)
• Run tests in parallel with matrix strategy
• Require status checks on protected branches
• Use environment secrets and variables
• Implement conditional jobs with if:
• Lint and format before testing
• Set explicit permissions with permissions
• Use runner labels for specific hardware
• Cache Docker layers for faster builds

❌ DON'T

• Store secrets in workflow files
• Run untrusted code in workflows
• Use secrets.* with pull requests from forks
• Hardcode credentials or tokens
• Miss error handling with continue-on-error
• Create overly complex workflows
• Skip testing on pull requests