Introduction to GitHub Actions - How to easily automate and integrate with GitHub

What you will learn

In this half-day workshop, open-source author, trainer and DevOps director Brent Laster will provide a solid introduction to GitHub Actions. You’ll learn about the core parts and pieces that make up an action, as well as the types of functionality and features they provide. You’ll also see how to combine them in simple workflows to accomplish basic tasks as well as how they can fit into a CI/CD environment. And you’ll learn about how to create and self-host your own actions.

This course will leverage hands-on, guided labs using GitHub and GitHub Actions so that participants can gain “real-world” experience with GitHub Actions.

Draft course outline (subject to change)

Section 1: A quick intro to GitHub Actions

Content: In this section, we’ll cover the basics of GitHub actions – what are they and why would we use them? We’ll cover what “event driven” means and what events, jobs, actions, steps, runners and workflows are. And we’ll see how they all related to each other and work together. We’ll see how to create and store a GitHub action. Finally, we’ll look at how to create a simple action.

Lab 1: Creating a simple example – In this lab, we’ll get a quick start learning about GitHub Actions by creating a simple project that uses them.
We'll also see what a first run of a workflow with actions looks like. this lab, attendees will create and use a basic GitHub Action

Section 2: Taking actions further

Content: In this section, we’ll cover how to find GitHub actions that might be of interest. We’ll look at how to share and version actions. And we’ll see how to use additional features with actions.

Lab 2: Learning more about Actions – In this lab, we'll see how to get more information about Actions and how to update our workflow to use others. We'll also see how to add jobs and commit changes through the browser interface.

Section 3: Working with your own action

Content: For this section, we’ll look at how to create and then use your own custom action

Lab 3: Adding your own action - in this lab, we'll see how to create and use a custom GitHub Action

Section 4: Looking at action logs and getting details

Content: For this section, we’ll dive into the logs produced for GitHub actions to understand what's really happening on the runner systems and also look at how to add some simple markup to add a status badge on your project.

Lab 4: Exploring logs - in this lab, we'll take a closer look at the different options for getting information from logs.

Section 5: Getting debug info

Content: In this section, we’ll cover how to get debug information when running through actions and workflows.

Lab 5: Looking at debug info - in this lab, we'll look at some ways to get more debugging info from our workflows

Part 6: Working with advanced workflows

Content: In this section, we'll look at various examples of advanced workflows including chaining workflows, using conditionals, and working with REST APIs to drive other events in GitHub.

Lab 6: Chaining workflows, using conditionals, and working with REST APIs in workflows.