Hello CI World

Overview

Teaching: 5 min
Exercises: 5 min

Questions

• How do I run a simple GitHub Actions job?

Objectives

• Add CI/CD to your project.

Now, we will be adding a GitHub Actions YAML file to a repository. This is all we will need to run CI using GitHub Actions.

If you haven’t already, use the Setup instructions to get the example intersect-training-cicd repository setup locally and remotely in GitHub.

Adding CI/CD to a project

The first thing we’ll do is create a .github/workflows/main.yml file in the project.

cd intersect-training-cicd
mkdir -p .github/workflows

Open .github/workflows/main.yml with your favorite editor and add the following

name: example
on: push
jobs:
  greeting:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Greeting!
        run: echo hello world

Run GitHub Actions

We’ve created the .github/workflows/main.yml file but it’s not yet on GitHub. Next step we’ll push these changes to GitHub so that it can run our job. Since we’re adding a new feature (adding CI) to our project, we’ll work in a feature branch.

git checkout -b add-ci
git add .github/workflows/main.yml
git commit -m "Adds initial GitHub Actions for CI"
git push -u origin add-ci

And that’s it! You’ve successfully run your CI job and you can view the output. You just have to navigate to the GitHub webpage for the intersect-training-cicd project and hit Actions button. There, you will find details of your job (status, output,…).

From this page, click through until you can find the output for the successful job run which should look like the following

Pull Request

Lastly, we’ll open up a pull request for this branch, since we plan to merge this back into main when we’re happy with the first iteration of the Actions.

See the beauty of the passing CI checks for your pull request!

Don’t merge yet!

We will just continue this Pull Request as we continue. Don’t merge into main yet.

Key Points

• Creating .github/workflows/main.yml is the first step to CI/CD.

• Pipelines are made of jobs with steps.