GitHub announces its take on CI/CD challenge - Unveils GitHub Actions with CI/CD

Recently GitHub live streamed and unveiled GitHub Actions with CI/CD Support. With GitHub Actions, GitHub provides a major support for automating the software workflows with CI/CD support to its users and developers.

As per GitHub, “GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging work the way you want.“

YouTube Announcement for GitHubActions

So what’s in the store?

With GitHub Actions, you can integrate the power of CI/CD with your usual GitHub events like push, issue creation, or a new release. With the help of a simple yaml file describing operations to be performed on your codebase, you can be rest assured that you have done a good job! Build any code (Node.js, Python, Java, Ruby, PHP, Go, Rust, .NET, and more), test on any host (Windows, Linux & MacOS) and deploy to almost any environment any cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP etc).

Whats more? While implementing CI/CD with GitHub Actions for your repositories, you get to see the live logs of how your build and deployment process is going and also see success and failures with an added functionality of copying the link to a specific line number to share. Also, Git flows now comes with an integrated secret store to secure all your secrets and use them with the help of environment variables.

How to implement?

GitHub Actions connect all of your tools and automates every step of your workflow defined in your yaml file. In order to get started, you may chose from several starter workflows mentioned here.

If you face any problems while expressing your CI/CD process with the predefined actions, you can always go ahead an extra mile and write them in JavaScript or create a container Action.

Sample Workflows and Actions

• Deploy to GCP: https://github.com/actions/gcloud
• Deploy to Kubernetes cluster: https://github.com/Azure/k8s-actions
• Deploy to AWS: https://github.com/actions/aws
• Deploy to Azure WebApp: https://github.com/Azure/appservice-actions
• Search code references with LaunchDarkly: https://github.com/launchdarkly/find-code-references
• Label a pull request: https://github.com/actions/labeler
• Code Coverage and Code Quality with CodeCov: https://github.com/codecov/codecov-action

Documentation – Your complete help solution!

https://help.github.com/en/categories/automating-your-workflow-with-github-actions

Pricing

Free for Open Source!!!
Free 2000 minutes per month for private repositories!!
With each license for Pro, Team and Enterprise you get included 3000, 10000 and 50000 minutes per month.
Also, for any additional hosted runner instances, you just need to pay a few extra bucks as mentioned below

Also, GitHub plans to include Self-Hosted runners in near future that too free of cost.

Availability

GitHub Actions are in Beta phase currently and are set to be generally available from November 13, 2019!
To register for GitHub Actions Beta access, please go to the given link and register: https://github.com/features/actions
* Beta registrations will process as in queue, hence it might take time for GitHub Actions be available for you.