Summary and Quiz on Automating Workflows With GitHub Actions

Summary

GitHub Actions is a powerful system for project maintainers to automate toilsome processes, enabling greater developer satisfaction and increased project velocity. We targeted Go in this section as the language of choice for GitHub Actions due to its type safety, low memory overhead, and speed. We believe that it is the best choice for writing GitHub Actions. However, many of the skills taught here are transferable to other languages. Each of the patterns, continuous integration, release pipelines, semantic versioning, and action creation can be applied to any project that you come into contact with.

The key to the section is to understand the impact of community contributions in the GitHub Marketplace. By using, building, and contributing to the marketplace, an engineer can make their automation more composable and empower community members to solve more complex problems through the contributions of the community.

We learned the basics of GitHub Actions with a focus on its features, which enable us to be functional quickly. With these basic skills, we were able to build a continuous integration automation workflow to clone, build, lint, and test the tweeter project. We extended the continuous integration automation to create a release pipeline trigger from Git tags. The release pipeline transformed manual tasks such as authoring release notes and made them an automated part of the release workflow. Finally, we created and published a custom Go GitHub Action that can be used by the entire community.

Quiz