What this tecnology does is to help you automate tasks within your software development lify cycle. Since this one is focused on event-drive, which means that the procedures are triggered by external events ( Pull Request, Push, API Call, and so on).
Basic structure.
name : [optional]
on : [push, pull requests, new issue, comments, manual, schedule].
This option is the one that determines whether the job(s) will be set out or not. You can even exclude paths and branches while checking the condition.
To get up to speed about this configurations check out reference .
A job is a set of steps that execute on the same runner and if there are more than one job will run in parallel by default . It contains the runner or SO/Environment( macos-latest,ubuntu-latest,window-latest) where everything is performed and the necessary. Here we can even set up conditional to decide when a job should be run even after meeting the event-driven condition by using the statement if right after clause.
jobs:
my-little-job:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
Steps can run commands, run setup tasks, or run an action in your repository, a public repository, or an action published in a Docker registry. The basic use of this feature is focus on running a single command, however, there is a marketplace where you can find some public actions that has been developed by others and we can take advantange of them by using uses.
steps:
- name: Echoing values
uses: actions/checkout@v2
run : echo "NietoL"
The public actions can be found on Marketplace.
Also one appealing feature is the strategy.matrix that enables you to generate multiple jobs but changing some attributes on runtime.