jimkring / github-actions-in-7-minutes

Presentation: "GitHub Actions in 7 Minutes" (Automating Development Tasks in the Cloud) by Jim Kring on July 20, 2022 at GDevCon NA in Golden Colorado, USA.

GitHub Actions in 7 Minutes

Automating Development Tasks in the Cloud

by Jim Kring on July 20, 2022 at GDevCon NA in Golden Colorado, USA

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0. Presentation Video

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1. Overview

1.a. GitHub

• Software project hosting in the cloud.
• Source code control (git), issue tracking, and much more.
• The defacto home for open source projects.
• Purchased by Microsoft in 2018 for 7.5B USD

1.b. GitHub Actions

• Perform automation tasks related to your project.
• You can create your own actions and use a variety of ones created by others.

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2. Your Questions Answered

2.a. GitHub Actions → What are they?

• They are recipes/scripts for work to be performed
• They (typically) perform work on your project source files

2.b. GitHub Actions → Where do they run?

• They run on servers "in the cloud" (not your local development computer)
• They can run on different platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows)

2.c. GitHub Actions → When do they run?

They run when events occur:

• manually (by button press on github.com project's 'actions' page)
• When code is pushed to repository
• On a pull request
• Periodically daily/hourly/etc.
• When external events "webhooks" occur

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3. Under the Hood

3.a. Key Terms (Table)

Term	Details
GitHub Actions	a big bucket of functionality for automating project tasks
Workflow	a YAML file that defines a set of jobs
YAML (files)	"Yet Another Markup Language" files are great for hierarchical config data used by build automation systems (e.g. GitHub and GitLab). more on that later..
Job	a set of steps that will run on a runner
Step	an atomic unit of work that uses an action, has a set of inputs, work, and outputs
Action	a local or remote folder with action.yml and support files that does the work of the action
Runner	a "computer" in the cloud that can do work (actions) for you
Hosted Runner	a runner provided by GitHub
Self-hosted Runner	a computer on which you have installed the github runner software and which isregistered with your github repository/project or organization.
Runner labels	a set of labels used to specify the operating system and installed software configuration of the runner (e.g. windows-2019, ubuntu-latest, macos-latest, self-hosted)

3.b. Workflow YAML Files

*.yml files in the workflows folder define jobs that will run when certain events happen.

Here's an example:

# .github/workflows/build-and-release.yml
name: Build and Release
on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  push: main
  pull_request:

env: # set environment variables
  FOO_VAR: 'bar_value'

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: windows-latest
    steps:
      # http://github.com/actions/checkout repo tag 'v3'
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          foo: 'bar' # input parameter
      - run: build_exes.ps1
        shell: powershell
  release:
    needs: build # depends on the build job (can't run in parallel)
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      # http://github.com/actions/checkout repo tag 'v3'
        - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v3
        with:
            name: executable
            path: builds/*.exe

3.c. .github Folder

Where github actions looks for stuff.

.github/
    actions/ (where local actions are kept)
        your_action_name/
            action.yml (defines inputs, steps, & outputs)
            *.* (files your action uses to do work) 
    workflows/ (put your workflows here)
        your_workflow_name.yml (each YAML file is a workflow)
            jobs: (workflows execute jobs on runners)
                steps: (steps can call/use "actions")
                    uses: (action name)

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4. Examples

4.a. Build Python Script into EXE

https://github.com/marketplace/actions/build-exe-from-python-script

4.b. Multi-Platform Builds

To build for a given platform, just choose a runner of the appropriate operating system. You can even build for multiple platforms in a single workflow using a matrix strategy, as shown below:

Here we see a workflow from the jimkring/kasa-cli project.

jobs:
  build:
    strategy:
      matrix:
        os: [macos-latest, ubuntu-latest, windows-latest]
      
    runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }}
    
    steps:
      - name: Check-out repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      - name: Setup Python
        uses: actions/setup-python@v4
        with:
          python-version: '3.10' # Version range or exact version of a Python version to use, using SemVer's version range syntax
          architecture: 'x64' # optional x64 or x86. Defaults to x64 if not specified
          cache: 'pip'
          cache-dependency-path: |
            **/requirements*.txt
            
      - name: Install Dependencies
        run: |
          pip install -r requirements.txt -r requirements-dev.txt
          
      - Name: Build Executable
        uses: jimkring/python-script-to-exe@v0.2.0
        with:
          script-name: kasa_cli
          onefile: true
  
      - name: Upload Artifacts
        uses: actions/upload-artifact@v3
        with:
          name: ${{ runner.os }} Build
          path: |
            build/*.exe
            build/*.bin
            build/*.app/**/*

And, here's what a resulting job run looks like:

https://github.com/jimkring/kasa-cli/actions/runs/2682890462

You can see that executable binaries were created for Mac, Linux, and Windows.

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5. Using Actions with LabVIEW

Show

Stay tuned...