CI/CD with GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform that helps you automate your software development workflows from within GitHub.

You can review and access to predefined actions in the Github marketplace, or create custom actions for your own workflows.

How to use GitHub actions?

Create a .github/workflows folder in your repository and add a .yml file with the following content:

mkdir -p .github/workflows
touch .github/workflows/run-project.yml
touch .github/workflows/documentation.yml

In this example we have created two workflow files, the run-project.yml to test our project and the documentation.yml to deploy the project documentation from mkdocs.

Actions YAML structure

The following yaml is a complete GitHub actions for create documentations (check out the comments for each component):

documentation.yaml

# Action to deploy the mkdocs documentation to the branch gh-pages.
name: On Push Deploy Documentation # Name of the workflow
on: push # Events that trigger the workflow
  # push:
  #   branches:
  #     - main
  #     - wip-release

# Jobs
jobs: # Jobs to run
    deploy: # Name of the job
        name: deploy-documentation
        runs-on: ubuntu-latest # Operating system to run the job on
        steps: # Steps to run
        - name: Checkout repo # Name of the step
          uses: actions/checkout@v2 # Action to run
        - name: Set up Python # Name of the step
          uses: actions/setup-python@v2 # Action to run
          with: # Inputs for the action
            python-version: 3.7.13 # Version of Python to use
        - name: Caching # Name of the step
          uses: actions/cache@v2 # Action to run
          with: # Inputs for the action
            path: $/{/{ env.pythonLocation /}/} # Path to cache
            key: $/{/{ env.pythonLocation /}/}-$/{/{ hashFiles('setup.py') /}/}-$/{/{ hashFiles('requirements.txt') /}/} # Key to use for restoring and saving the cache
        - name: Install dependencies # Name of the step
          run: | # Commands to run
            python -m pip install --upgrade pip
            pip install mkdocs
            pip install mkdocs-material
            pip install pymdown-extensions
        - name: Deploy documentation # Name of the step
          run: mkdocs gh-deploy --clean --force --verbose # Command to run