Mastering GitHub Actions: Advance your automation skills with the latest techniques for software integration and deployment

Mastering GitHub Actions
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About the reviewers
Preface
   Who this book is for
   What this book covers
   To get the most out of this book
   Download the example code files
   Conventions used
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Part 1:Centralized Workflows to Assist with Governance
1
An Overview of GitHub and GitHub Actions
   Technical requirements
   Exploring the GitHub platform
      Walk-through of the overview interface and features
   The different types of accounts on GitHub
   Creating a personal GitHub account
   The different types of plans on GitHub
      GitHub Free
      GitHub Team
      GitHub Enterprise
   Creating an organization account
   A brief introduction to GitHub Actions
   An overview of organization accounts
      Managing teams
      Organization defaults
      GitHub Actions
   The .github repository
   Templates and reusable workflow repositories
      Reusable workflows
      Workflow templates
   Summary
2
Exploring Workflows
   Technical requirements
   Exploring workflow capabilities
      Events or triggers
      Jobs
      Steps
      Features of a workflow
      Using events to trigger workflows
   Workflow structuring and good habits
   Exploring workflow jobs
      Understanding how jobs work
      Running jobs in a container
      Running services
   Summary
3
Deep Dive into Reusable Workflows and Composite Actions
   Technical requirements
   Setting up the CLI
   Introducing reusable workflows
      Reusable workflows versus normal workflows
      Use cases for reusable workflows
      Limitations of reusable workflows
   Understanding composite actions
      Key concepts of composite actions
      Use cases for composite actions
      Limitations of composite actions
   Creating a reusable build pipeline
      Marking a workflow as a reusable workflow
      Creating a local composite action
   Debugging techniques for workflows
      act workflow debugging tool
      Visual Studio Code GitHub Actions plugin
      Debugging event data
      Runner diagnostic logging
      Step debug logging
   Workflow monitoring and alerting
      GitHub notification capabilities
      Integrating GitHub Actions with Slack
      Datadog
   Summary
4
Workflow Personalization Using GitHub Apps
   Technical requirements
   GitHub token options
      GitHub App tokens
      GitHub personal access tokens
      Workflow tokens
   Creating a GitHub App
   Installing and managing the App’s credentials
   Leveraging a GitHub App in various use cases
   Summary
5
Utilizing Starter Workflows in Your Team
   Technical requirements
   What are starter workflows?
      Accessing starter workflows
      Starter workflows in a private repository
   Creating our starter workflow
   Utilizing our starter workflow
   Applications of self-service reusable workflows
   Summary
Part 2: Implementing Advanced Patterns within Actions
6
Using HashiCorp Vault in GitHub
   Technical requirements
   Understanding what OIDC is
      How to get an Identity token in a workflow
      OIDC in reusable workflows
   Setting up a HashiCorp Cloud Vault instance
      What is HashiCorp Cloud Vault?
      Creating a HashiCorp Cloud Platform account
      Accessing your Vault cluster
   Understanding secret engines and where secrets are stored
      Creating a secret in Vault that GitHub Actions can access
      Adding our Slack API token as a secret
   Enabling JWT authentication in HashiCorp
      Enabling JWT for GitHub-produced tokens
      What is JWKS?
      Creating a HashiCorp secret policy
      Creating a HashiCorp JWT role
   Setting up a workflow to use HashiCorp
   Exploring other security hardening techniques
      Implementing CODEOWNERS
      OIDC action recommendations
      HashiCorp actions recommendations
      Azure Key Vault
   Summary
7
Deploying to Azure Using OpenID Connect
   Technical requirements
   Exploring our infrastructure using Bicep
      Why Bicep?
      Understanding the components of Bicep
      Azure infrastructure requirements
   Deploying locally with the Azure CLI
      Understanding the folder structure
      Deploying our resource group with the Azure CLI
      Deploying our container registry with the Azure CLI
      Deploying our container instance with the Azure CLI
   Deploying infrastructure alongside our application code
      The teardown
      Adding infrastructure to our repository
      Best practices and areas for improvement
      Reusable workflows for applications and infrastructure
   Authorizing our deployments with Azure and OIDC
      Subject patterns and their limitations
      Using OIDC for Azure in the reusable workflow
      Correcting the trust
   Summary
8
Working with Checks
   Technical requirements
   Exploring check suites and checks
      What are checks?
      Introducing check suites
      Interacting with the Checks API
   Understanding commit statuses
      What are commit statuses?
      Interacting with commit statuses
      When should we use commit statuses over checks?
   Creating checks and check suites
      Understanding how check suites work
      Working with the GitHub API
      Creating a check
   Failing and passing checks
      Conclusions
      Playing with check outcomes
   Creating custom actions
      What makes an action an action?
      Types of actions
      Defining outputs in actions
      Let’s create an action
      Putting our action to use
   Exploring further action opportunities
      Branding
      Creating/updating check runs
      Controlling check failures
      Creating checks with different tokens
   Summary
9
Annotating Code with Actions
   Technical requirements
   Exploring annotations within checks
      The structure of an annotation
      Creating annotations on a check run
      Understanding the validation rules for annotations
   Annotations in action
      Introducing annotation support for our RichChecks action
   Creating annotations from build output
      Infrastructure linting
      Displaying our results
   Creating annotations from a GitHub App using Probot
      Exploring Probot-powered apps
      The importance of a spell checker
   Summary
10
Advancing with Event-Driven Workflows
   Technical requirements
   Understanding GitHub events more deeply
      The core of GitHub event payloads
      Tailored automation with events
   Creating an issue from a pull request
      Subscribing to the event
      Introducing the GitHub Issues API
      Creating an issue
      Linking pull requests to issues
   Promoting your new releases
      What are GitHub releases?
      Creating a release manually
      Subscribing to the event
      Creating the communication
      Targeting published releases
   Designing a chatbot using ChatGPT
      Subscribing to the event and collecting the data
      Creating a conversation with OpenAIs APIs
   Helpful AI actions and apps
      Code Autopilot – AI coder
      OpenCommit
   Summary
11
Setting Up Self-Hosted Runners
   Technical requirements
   Exploring self-hosted runners
      Action runner variants
      Action runner groups
      Deploying self-hosted runners
      A local runner in action
   Exploring ARC
      How does it work?
      Scaling options
      Monitoring and troubleshooting
   Running ARC locally
      A brief overview of Kubernetes
      Understanding the importance of containers
      Setting up Minikube
      Installing Helm
      Deploying ARC on Minikube
   Using the cloud for your runs
      Setting up Kubernetes using Bicep
      Setting up a GitHub App
      Deploying the new ARC
   Advanced techniques with ARC
      Scaling in ARC
      Running within a proxy
      Runner labels
      Customizing the runner specification
      Observing our self-hosted infrastructure
   Housekeeping
   Summary
Part 3: Best Practices, Patterns, Tricks, and Tips Toolkit
12
The Crawler Pattern
   Technical requirements
   Introducing the crawler pattern
      How does this pattern work?
      Methods of feeding the matrix
   Making bulk repository changes
      Adding permissions to all repositories
      Adding branch protection
   Making bulk content changes
      Understanding the workflow
      Rolling out content in bulk
   Summary
13
The Configuration Centralization Pattern
   Technical requirements
   Understanding the central configuration pattern
   Creating a repository indexer
      Schedules in GitHub workflows
      Setting up the indexer
   Hosting the results using GitHub Pages
      Configuring the repository for GitHub Pages
      Creating the action for the deployment
      Where to go next
   Summary
14
Using Remote Workflows to Kickstart Your Products
   Technical requirements
   Introducing repository dispatch events
      Advantages of repository dispatch events
      Requirements for creating a repository dispatch event
      Setting up a repository dispatch workflow
   Understanding product kickstarters
      A brief overview of product kickstarters
      Creating template repositories
      Building a kickstarter template
   Internal developer portal and other use cases
      Adding portal visibility for developers
      Exploring other use cases
   Summary
15
Housekeeping Tips for Your Organization
   Technical requirements
   Managing GitHub costs
      GitHub spending limits
      Alerting on usage
      Usage monitoring
      Workflow usage across the organization
   Optimizing uploads and downloads
      Compressible artifact action
      Methods for eliminating GitHub storage
   Useful reporting techniques for your organization
      Creating a dormant user report
      Creating a user member contribution report
   Managing your action updates with Dependabot
   Summary
16
Handy Workflows for Managing Your Software
   Technical requirements
   Exploring commit and pull request linters
      PR linters
      Commit linters
   SBOM generation as part of release management
   Your actions toolkit
      Building and deploying pipelines
      Community action lists
      GitHub certifications
   Summary
Index
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