GitHub Actions are a powerful tool to automate your workflow. They can be used to run tests, deploy your code, publish a package, and much more.

The cool thing is, there's a GitHub Actions Marketplace where you can find a lot of actions created by... the community.

But what if you can't find the action you need? You can create your own and publish it there!

How to use this tutorial

The full tutorial (all chapters at once) is also available as a video, which you can find here:

Chapter 2: Running the Action

If you already followed the Chapter 1, we're all set! It's time to run our action.

Creating a workflow

On GitHub, Actions are executed by workflows. A workflow is defined in a .yml file stored in the .github/workflows folder of the repository so let's create it.

mkdir -p .github/workflows
touch .github/workflows/greet.yml

The name of the file doesn't matter, but it's good practice to give it a meaningful name.

What matters is the content of the file, which defines the workflow. To keep it simple, here are the minimal instructions you need.

name: Say Hello

on:
  workflow_dispatch:

jobs:
  run-my-action:
    name: Checks if this action works
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: ./

In this case, the action will checkout the current repository and then run the action we just created. We put ./ as the action path because we want to run the action from the current repository, but we could also use a different repository.

How does GitHub know what action to run? It's defined in the action.yml file we created earlier.

One more line worth mentioning is on: workflow_dispatch: which tells GitHub to run the workflow when we manually trigger it from the Actions tab. I recorded a dedicated video about running GitHub Actions manually, if you want to learn more about it.

Running the workflow

We can now push our code to GitHub and see the action in action!

git add .
git commit -m "Add workflow"
git push

Once the code is pushed, we can go to the Actions tab and trigger the workflow manually.

The workflow will start running and we'll see the logs of the action in the console.

Congratulations! You just created and ran your first GitHub Action!

Running the action locally

In case you want to run the action locally, without having to commit/push every time, you can use the act tool.

npm install -g act

Then you can run the action by executing act in the root of the repository.

act

You can find more in my video about running GitHub Actions locally.

Closing

And that was it for today! if you have any question or suggestion, feel free to add a comment :)

See you in the next chapter!

Thanks for reading this article, I hope you found it interesting!

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Leonardo MontiniFollow

Awarded GitHub Star since 2023 ⭐️ and Microsoft MVP since 2024 🔷 I talk about Open Source, GitHub, and Web Development. I also run a YouTube channel called DevLeonardo, see you there!