Akul Srivastava

structure of a github action

Github reserves a path for all your github action workflows in your repository i.e. .github/workflows and these workflows are written in YAML format i.e. (.yml)

repository
└─── .github
│   └─── workflows
│       │   check-lint.yml
│       │   label.yml
│       │   ...
└─── .gitignore
└─── README.md
└─── ...

The structure of a github action workflow and its constituents are as follows:

name - This will be the name of your workflow, and it will be displayed in the Actions tab of your repository. It acts as an identifier for your workflow.

name - My Workflow

on - This defines the event, on the occurrence of which, it will automatically trigger the corresponding workflow.

For single event,

on - push

For multiple event,

on - [push, fork]

For specific branch,

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - development
      - staging
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - development

For scheduled time, (to create cron string you can use - crontab guru). With the following event, the workflow will run Every Day Mon-Fri at 10.30 AM

on:
  schedule:
    - cron: "30 10 * * 1-5"

jobs - A workflow is a collection of jobs, a job is a collection of steps, and a step is where we actually do something.

jobs:
  hello-world:
    steps:
      - run: echo Hello World

By default, jobs run in parallel, meaning that if you have multiple jobs they will start together. We can make them sequential by adding a needs key.

jobs:
  say-hello:
    steps:
      - run: echo Hello
  say-world:
    steps:
      - needs: say-hello
      - run: echo World

You can also read and explore the official documentation for workflow syntax.