https://DevOpsCloud.io -- Cloud Monk Losang Jinpa, Ph.D., MCSE/MCT, GitOps DevOps Engineer

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• https://learning.oreilly.com/search/?query=github%20actions
• https://learning.oreilly.com/search/?query=github

Creating a comprehensive summary of GitHub Actions with all the requested details in MediaWiki syntax is a substantial task. Here, I'll provide an overview that encapsulates the essence of GitHub Actions, including its main features, examples, popular third-party libraries, and alternatives, focusing on the core aspects.

GitHub Actions is a CI/CD and automation platform that enables developers to automate their workflow directly from their GitHub repositories. It allows for automatic builds, testing, and deployments.

While GitHub Actions is integrated into GitHub and doesn't have a separate repository, you can find many GitHub Actions developed by the community and GitHub itself within the GitHub Marketplace: [GitHub Marketplace Actions](https://github.com/marketplace?type=actions).

The official documentation for GitHub Actions provides comprehensive guides, reference materials, and tutorials to help you get started and master GitHub Actions: [GitHub Actions Documentation](https://docs.github.com/en/actions).

GitHub Actions is a feature within GitHub's ecosystem, with its details and features highlighted on the official GitHub website: [GitHub Features - Actions](https://github.com/features/actions).

For an overview and historical context, Wikipedia offers a summary of GitHub Actions within its page on GitHub: [GitHub - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub#GitHub_Actions).

1. **Workflow Automation**: Automate your build, test, and deployment workflows. 2. **Custom Workflows**: Create workflows that fit your development process using the YAML syntax. 3. **Hosted Runners**: Run workflows on GitHub-hosted runners in virtual environments. 4. **Matrix Builds**: Run tests across multiple versions of languages or environments simultaneously. 5. **Docker Container Support**: Use or build Docker containers within workflows.

```yaml name: CI

on: [push]

jobs:

 build:
   runs-on: ubuntu-latest

   steps:
   - uses: actions/checkout@v2
   - name: Run a one-line script
     run: echo Hello, world!

```

```yaml jobs:

 build:
   runs-on: ubuntu-latest
   strategy:
     matrix:
       node-version: [10.x, 12.x, 14.x]
   steps:
   - uses: actions/checkout@v2
   - name: Use Node.js ${{ matrix.node-version }}
     uses: actions/setup-node@v1
     with:
       node-version: ${{ matrix.node-version }}

```

```yaml steps: - name: Build and Deploy

 uses: JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action@releases/v3
 with:
   GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
   BRANCH: gh-pages
   FOLDER: build

```

```yaml steps: - uses: actions/checkout@v2 - uses: actions/cache@v2

 with:
   path: node_modules
   key: ${{ runner.os }}-node-${{ hashFiles('**/package-lock.json') }}
   restore-keys: ]] | [[
     ${{ runner.os }}-node-

```

```yaml jobs:

 build:
   runs-on: ubuntu-latest

   steps:
   - uses: actions/checkout@v2
   - name: Run a Docker container
     uses: docker://alpine:3.10
     with:
       args: /bin/sh -c "echo Hello, world!"

```

```yaml steps: - uses: actions/checkout@v2 - name: Use Node.js 14

 uses: actions/setup-node@v2
 with:
   node-version: '14'

```

```yaml steps: - uses: actions/checkout@v2 - name: Install Dependencies

 run: npm install

- name: Run Tests

 run: npm test

```

```yaml on:

 workflow_dispatch:

```

1. **actions/checkout**: Checks out your repository under `$GITHUB_WORKSPACE`. 2. **actions/setup-node**: Sets up a Node.js environment. 3. **actions/cache**: Caches dependencies and build outputs. 4. **JamesIves/github-pages-deploy-action**: Automates the deployment to GitHub Pages. 5. **actions/upload-artifact**: Uploads artifacts from your workflow.

GitHub Actions competes with other CI/CD and automation platforms: 1. ** Jenkins**: A

self-hosted automation server with a vast plugin ecosystem.

2. ** GitLab CI/CD**: Integrated CI/CD within the GitLab ecosystem. 3. ** CircleCI**: A cloud-based platform for automated testing and deployment. 4. ** Travis CI**: A cloud-based continuous integration service. 5. ** Azure Pipelines**: Part of Azure DevOps Services for CI/CD pipelines.

This summary encapsulates the essence of GitHub Actions, showcasing how it integrates with the GitHub ecosystem to provide powerful automation, CI/CD capabilities, and workflow optimization directly from repositories. GitHub Actions simplifies the automation of software workflows, making it easier for developers to build, test, and deploy their code.

Snippet from Wikipedia: GitHub

GitHub () is a proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, GitHub, Inc. has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.

It is commonly used to host open source software development projects. As of January 2023, GitHub reported having over 100 million developers and more than 420 million repositories, including at least 28 million public repositories. It is the world's largest source code host as of June 2023. Over five billion developer contributions were made to more than 500 million open source projects in 2024.

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Fair Use Sources:

• https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/quickstart/github-glossary
• The Official Git Glossary
• Git Reference
• Git SCM
• B0978TF66B (G4Pg 2021)
• B01NBEQCA1 (PrGt 2016)
• B0827FGT77 (BgGH 2019)
• 9781492091127 (VCgt 2022)
• B07RGKKBTY (GHDum 2019)