DevOps Directive GitHub Actions Course

This is the companion repo to: GitHub Actions: Beginner to Pro

🙌 Sponsored by Namespace Labs

This course is made possible thanks to namespace.so, the best way level up your software build and developer workflows!

• Faster GitHub Actions: Hosted GHA runners for faster runs at a fraction of the cost!
• Faster Docker Builds: Remote Docker builders for massive container build speedups!
• Continuous Integration Visibility: Clear metrics and analytics to enable further CI optimization!

📚 Course Outline

• History & Motivation: why pipeline automation matters and the deployment metrics it influences.
• Why GitHub Actions?: managed runners, marketplace, and comparisons with other CI/CD tools.
• Core Features: workflows, jobs, steps, events, expressions, and secrets.
• Advanced Features: permissions, third-party authentication, caching, artifacts, and runner options.
• Marketplace Actions: discover and safely consume community actions.
• Authoring Actions: composite, reusable, JavaScript, and container actions.
• Common Workflows: validate, build, deploy, and automate your repository.
• Developer Experience: run locally with act, debug runs, and gather insights.
• Best Practices: performance tuning, maintainability, and security.
• Capstone Project: apply everything in a hands-on final exercise.

Development Environment Setup

1. Clone this repository (including submodules)

git clone --recurse-submodules [email protected]:sidpalas/devops-directive-github-actions-course.git

1. Install DevBox – DevBox bootstraps all required CLI tools (Go, Node.js, Python, act, task, npc, civo, gh, jq, yq, kubectl, kluctl, ...).
   Follow the official installation guide: https://www.jetify.com/docs/devbox/installing-devbox/index#

   After installing devbox, run devbox shell to start a shell session with these tools installed/configured.

2. Install Docker Desktop
   Download and install from: https://docs.docker.com/get-started/introduction/get-docker-desktop/

3. Configure VS Code

   a. YAML YAML syntax highlighting & linting

   b. GitHub Actions (optional): Workflow file syntax highlighting & snippets

[!WARNING] The GitHub Actions extension modifies the "file type" of wiles within /.github/workflows/ causing the YAML extension to not recognize those files. To fix this, you can add an explicit files.associations entry to your settings

{
  "files.associations": {
    "**/.github/workflows/*.{yml,yaml}": "yaml",
    "**/Taskfile.{yml,yaml}": "yaml"
  }
}