obotezatu / awesome-github-actions

Discover a collection of GitHub Actions workflow examples that will supercharge your development process. Level up your projects with the efficiency and reliability of GitHub Actions, saving time and ensuring high-quality code

Awesome GitHub Actions

This repository serves as a comprehensive collection of GitHub Actions workflows examples. It provides a variety of workflow configurations that demonstrate different use cases and best practices for automating CI/CD processes using GitHub Actions. Each example includes a name for the workflow, a list of trigger events, and a set of jobs. Each job contains a list of steps that execute in order when the job runs. These steps may access environment variables, conditions, expressions, and secrets to perform various actions, such as checking out the source repository, running scripts, and setting up a tmate session for debugging purposes. Examples cover different areas of functionality, such as job matrix, parallel jobs, job ordering, context variables, expression evaluation, outputting variables, and event triggers.

Self-hosted runners

A runner is a server that runs your workflows when they're triggered. Each runner can run a single job at a time. GitHub provides Ubuntu Linux, Microsoft Windows, and macOS runners to run your workflows; each workflow run executes in a fresh, newly-provisioned virtual machine. If you need a different operating system or require a specific hardware configuration, you can host your own runners. A self-hosted runner is a system that you deploy and manage to execute jobs from GitHub Actions on GitHub.com.

Prerequisites:

1. Create VMs to use as a self-hosted runners

• To create VMs in Proxmox use scripts

• To create VMs in Hyper-V use steps

2. Install docker if you want to run workflow jobs in containers

• Manjaro

• Ubuntu

3. Install tmate for debugging

Repository-level runners

1. Create fork from the main repository

2. Clone project

git clone https://github.com/Alliedium/awesome-github-actions.git $HOME/awesome-github-actions

Replace the https://github.com/Alliedium/awesome-github-actions.git repository URL with the fork URL you created

3. Add self-hosted Linux runner to GitHub repository.

Run commands on runner Linux VM

• Create a actions-runner folder

mkdir actions-runner && cd actions-runner

• Download the latest runner package

curl -o actions-runner-linux-x64-2.305.0.tar.gz -L https://github.com/actions/runner/releases/download/v2.305.0/actions-runner-linux-x64-2.305.0.tar.gz

• Extract the installer

tar xzf ./actions-runner-linux-x64-2.305.0.tar.gz

• Create the runner and start the configuration experience

./config.sh --url https://github.com/Alliedium/awesome-github-actions --token AL24AM7L6GS3RRSBBTGSSILESXOW6

Replace the https://github.com/Alliedium/awesome-github-actions repository URL with the fork URL you created

• run it!

./run.sh

3. Add self-hosted Windows runner to GitHub repository.

• In Windows machine open PowerShell
• Create a folder under the drive root

mkdir actions-runner; cd actions-runner

• Download the latest runner package

Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://github.com/actions/runner/releases/download/v2.305.0/actions-runner-win-x64-2.305.0.zip -OutFile actions-runner-win-x64-2.305.0.zip

• Extract the installer

Add-Type -AssemblyName System.IO.Compression.FileSystem ; [System.IO.Compression.ZipFile]::ExtractToDirectory("$PWD/actions-runner-win-x64-2.305.0.zip", "$PWD")

• Create the runner and start the configuration experience

./config.cmd --url https://github.com/Alliedium/awesome-github-actions --token AL24AM56SRAXQCYI7PF7KW3ES5ILY

Replace the https://github.com/Alliedium/awesome-github-actions repository URL with the fork URL you created

• Run it!

./run.cmd

• Use this YAML in your workflow file for each job

runs-on: self-hosted

3. Add self-hosted docker runner to GitHub repository.

• Navigate to awesome-github-actions/07-job-matrix/ folder

cd $HOME/awesome-github-actions/07-job-matrix

• Build docker image

docker build -t runner:0.1 \
	--build-arg REPO_URL=https://github.com/Alliedium/awesome-github-actions \
	--build-arg TOKEN='AL24AMZNNIJVECQ34ANMH23ESNYCW' \
    --build-arg LABELS='ubuntu-18.04' \
    --build-arg RUNNER_NAME='docker-runner' \
    -f $HOME/awesome-github-actions/07-job-matrix/Dockerfile \
    $HOME/awesome-github-actions/07-job-matrix

Replace the https://github.com/Alliedium/awesome-github-actions repository URL with the fork URL you created

• Run docker image

docker run --name runner -d runner:0.1

4. Run workflow jobs on Linux runners

For our runner examples we used the $HOME/awesome-github-actions/.github/workflows/07-job-matrix.yml file.

Copy $HOME/awesome-github-actions/07-job-matrix/workflows/self-hosted-wf.yml file content to $HOME/awesome-github-actions/.github/workflows/07-job-matrix.yml file.

Workflow will execute on any runner that matches all of the specified runs-on values This runs-on: [ self-hosted, Linux ] matches all Linux runners.

As you can see, the job runs on any Linux runner, regardless of the version of the Linux distribution specified in the job

5. Run workflow jobs on Linux runners that match distribution version, specified in job.

Copy $HOME/awesome-github-actions/07-job-matrix/workflows/self-hosted-labels-wf.yml file content to $HOME/awesome-github-actions/.github/workflows/07-job-matrix.yml file.

The job runs on a runner that matches the version of the Linux distribution specified in the job

6. Run workflow jobs in containers on Linux runners on which the docker is installed

Copy $HOME/awesome-github-actions/07-job-matrix/workflows/self-hosted-containers-wf.yml file content to $HOME/awesome-github-actions/.github/workflows/07-job-matrix.yml file.

7. Debugging running workflow

Tmate is a terminal sharing software that allows users to share their command-line interface (CLI) sessions with others over the internet. Copy $HOME/awesome-github-actions/07-job-matrix/workflows/self-hosted-labels-tmate-wf.yml file content to $HOME/awesome-github-actions/.github/workflows/07-job-matrix.yml file.

cp $HOME/awesome-github-actions/07-job-matrix/workflows/self-hosted-labels-tmate-wf.yml $HOME/awesome-github-actions/.github/workflows/07-job-matrix.yml

This workflow will fail because running npm test without npm ci. Tmate will pause the job and establish a terminal session with the runner.

Fix the issue in terminal. To exit the terminal, create a file with continue name.

8. Deleting running from repo

Navigate to actions-runner folder and in Runner terminal run command

./config.sh remove --token AL24AM5N3UAUQDRAKNU5XJDETDEBC