Adding Github Actions to a repo

Reference: Understanding GitHub Actions: Create an Example Workflow

• In your repo, create a directory called .github/workflows/, and inside there, create an arbitrary named yml file for your workflow. For example, .github/workflows/example-workflow.yml, with code like:

  name: this-is-the-workflow-name # Pick a name you like. on: [push] jobs: this-is-the-job-name: # Pick a name you like. runs-on: self-hosted steps: - uses: actions/checkout@v4 - run: echo "hello world"

• For details on formatting this file, see Understanding GitHub Actions: Understanding the workflow file. For your convenience, highlights are provided here:

• Notice the jobs field contains a hash, or dictionary, of jobs. You may create more than one job, which will perform multiple actions on multiple runners.

• If you need have different branches trigger different runners on different machines, see an example at: https://github.com/Tufts-Technology-Services/dbaadmin-scripts/tree/develop/.github/workflows

• runs-on specifies which runner you wish your job to run on.

  • For a list of github cloud-hosted runners, see About GitHub-hosted runners

  • For a Tufts on-prem runner, please see Making a private Github Runner

• uses: actions/checkout@v4 This will checkout your repository in the working directory where the job runs. It is generally recommended to keep this line as-is, unless you have a reason to change it.

• run: lines specify actual commands that will run on the runner. You may specify more than one.