GitHub Actions

Introduction

GitHub’s actions are an awesome way to have CI on GitHub. It runs on VM, can run Container and even release things for you. First, you need to specify the events that trigger the action.

name: install dotfiles
on:
  push:
    paths:
      - .github/workflows/install.yaml
      - install.sh
      - scripts/env.sh
      - start.sh

Then you need to use pre-defined actions to install the required tools:

• @actions/setup-node
• @actions/setup-go
• @actions/setup-python
• @azure/setup-helm
• @extractions/setup-just

Note

To reduce the build time, use caching mechanisms. Usually official setup tools supports caching based on the dependency management tools (e.g. go.sum, packages-lock.json, etc.)

- uses: actions/setup-python@v5
  with:
    python-version: "3.13"
    cache: "pipenv"
 
- uses: actions/setup-python@v5
  with:
    python-version: "3.13"
    cache: "poetry"
 
- uses: actions/setup-go@v5
  with:
    go-version-file: "go.mod"
 
- uses: actions/setup-node@v4
  with:
    node-version: 21
    cache: "npm"
    cache-dependency-path: "package-lock.json"

For some programming languages, there is no official action:

• GitHub Action to compile LaTeX documents
• Sets up Tectonic in your GitHub Actions workflow, so you can compile your LaTeX documents

For building docker images and pushing them you can use:

• GitHub Action to build and push Docker images with Buildx
• GitHub Action to extract metadata (tags, labels) from Git reference and GitHub events for Docker

For releasing Helm charts (using HTTP Helm repositories not OCI one):

• A GitHub Action to turn a GitHub project into a self-hosted Helm chart repo, using helm/chart-releaser CLI tool

For doing release:

• GitHub Action for creating GitHub Releases

References

• Reference