I’ve been learning programming on my own for quite a while, and I’ve always felt reasonably comfortable using GitHub. I had noticed the GitHub Actions tab in repositories before, but since I didn’t have a real need for it at the time, I never looked into it. Only recently, after wanting to automate a few repetitive tasks, did I realize that GitHub had already built this kind of automation into the platform.
What is GitHub Actions?
GitHub Actions is GitHub’s built-in service for continuous integration and continuous deployment, usually shortened to CI/CD. It lets developers define automated workflows directly inside a repository, so when certain changes happen in the codebase, GitHub can automatically run tasks for you.
Those tasks can include things like building a project, running tests, deploying an application, or sending notifications. In practice, it gives development teams a more efficient way to manage and maintain software projects without doing every step manually.
What can you do with it?
The short answer is: quite a lot.
At its core, GitHub Actions runs scripts and commands in response to events in your repository. For example, if you are working on a frontend project, you might normally build and bundle it on your own machine. With GitHub Actions, you can turn that process into an automated job that runs whenever a specific event is triggered in the repository.
A simple example would be a blog built with Next.js that uses .md files as content. You could configure a workflow so that whenever you push a new Markdown post into the blog repository, a build process starts automatically. Instead of building the site locally every time, GitHub handles the build and publishes the static pages for you.
That reduces the update process significantly. In a setup like that, publishing a new article can become as simple as pushing your code.
Using GitHub Actions to deploy a Next.js project
For many common tasks, you do not even need to write everything from scratch. GitHub provides an Actions marketplace, and most of the common workflow steps people need are already available there.
Take deploying a Next.js project as an example:
# .github/workflows/build.yml
name: Build, Export and Publish Next.js App
on:
push:
branches:
- main
pull_request:
branches:
- main
workflow_dispatch:
jobs:
build:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v2
- uses: actions/setup-node@v2
with:
node-version: 14.x
- run: |
npm i
npm run build
- name: Next Pages
uses: anorcle/[email protected]
- name: Commit and push changes
run: |
git config --global user.name "anorcle"
git config --global user.email "[email protected]"
git add -A
git commit -m "New Build"
git push
This workflow file automates the build, export, and publishing process for a Next.js application. It is the kind of ready-made setup you can find directly in the marketplace.
As for what each part of the configuration does, the structure is not especially mysterious once you start reading it: it defines when the workflow runs, what environment it uses, and which steps should execute in order. Even without deep experience, it is easy to break down piece by piece.
Why it feels useful
What makes GitHub Actions appealing is not just that it can run builds or deployments, but that it removes repeated manual work from your workflow. Once a process is stable and predictable, there is a good chance it can be turned into an action.
And that is why it seems like such a practical option. There are far more use cases than the examples above, and getting comfortable with it can save a lot of effort.