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Continuous Integration / Continuous Development (CI/CD) - Github Edition

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Hello CI World

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 10 min
Questions

  • How do I run a simple GitHub Actions job?

Objectives

  • Add CI/CD to your project.

Adding CI/CD to a project

The first thing we’ll do is create a .github/workflows/main.yml file in the project.

cd virtual-pipelines-eventselection/
mkdir -p .github/workflows
touch .github/workflows/main.yml

This repository happens to already contain a workflow, so let’s delete it so we can focus on our own workflow.

rm .github/workflows/test-analysis.yml

Open .github/workflows/main.yml with your favorite editor and add the following

name: example
on: push
jobs:
  greeting:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - run: echo hello world

Run GitHub Actions

Now, let’s see it in action!

We’ve created the .github/workflows/main.yml file but it’s not yet on GitHub. We’ll push these changes to GitHub so that it can run our job.

Since we’re adding a new feature (Actions) to our project, we’ll work in a feature branch. This is just a human-friendly named branch to indicate that it’s adding a new feature.

cd virtual-pipelines-eventselection/
git checkout -b feature/add-actions
git add .github/workflows/main.yml
git commit -m "my first actions"
git push -u origin feature/add-actions

And that’s it! You’ve successfully run your CI/CD job and you can view the output. You just have to navigate to the GitHub webpage for the virtual-pipelines-eventselection project and hit Actions button, you will find details of your job (status, output,…).

GitHub Actions Page

From this page, click through until you can find the output for the successful job run which should look like the following CI/CD Hello World Success Output

Pull Request

Lastly, we’ll open up a pull request for this branch, since we plan to merge this back into main when we’re happy with the first iteration of the Actions.

Draft Pull Requests

If you expect to be working on a branch for a bit of time while you have a pull request open, it’s good etiquette to mark it as a “draft pull request.” This makes clear to everyone that you will continue to add new commits and that it may not yet be the right time to review the pull request. Once you are ready with the work, you can mark the pull request as “ready for review.”

Key Points

  • Creating .github/workflows/main.yml is the first step to salvation.

  • Pipelines are made of jobs with steps.

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