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Davide 'CoderDave' Benvegnù
Davide 'CoderDave' Benvegnù

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Automate everything! - GitHub Actions Showcase

GitHub Actions is now the most popular Build Platform on GitHub. But it is also much more than a CI system: it is a very powerful automation engine.

Let's take a look at how we can do CI with Actions, and how we can automate operations on our GitHub projects.

Intro

Today I want to talk about GitHub Actions, and explore with you what we can do with it. Many people in fact think that Actions are just meant for CI CD. But in reality the service does much more than that.

It is a pretty powerful automation platform that is able to respond to more than 90 events, including of course the code push to the repo, which will indeed start a CI run, but also many others that are not related to code.
For example, you can do something whenever a user creates a new Issue, or when they open a Pull Request. Or even when a new comment is added.
Basically, if you can automate it you can do it with Actions!

To show you what you can do with Actions, I created some examples (which I have also used during the Hong Kong Opensource conference I've presented at last week) and I've gone through them in the video below.

The Video

Enjoy the watch!

Conclusion

This was a quick showcase of what you can do with GitHub Actions.

But as I've said before, you are by no means limited to what I've shown you here. You can do much much more.

You can take a look at the example in the Github Repo I've created, and please leave me a comment below to let me know:

  1. Do you already use Actions for something non CICD-related?
  2. What do you think of GitHub Actions?
  3. Do you have any other question?

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Top comments (2)

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hangindev profile image
Jason Leung 🧗‍♂️👨‍💻

Hi Dave from Hong Kong! Thanks for the intro! I need to learn more about GitHub Actions.

Btw, the link of the Github repo in the post is not working. HKOSConf2020 should be hkoscon2020. 😛

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n3wt0n profile image
Davide 'CoderDave' Benvegnù

Hey, thanks for letting me know! I've fixed it now.