GitHub has launched a new tool called GitHub Actions that you can use to build, share and execute code directly on the site. It is designed to cut down on the steps necessary to execute code.

Actions was launched as a limited public beta at GitHub Universe in San Francisco. Announcing the improvements for developers, Sam Lambert, Head of Platform, said GitHub is:

“relentlessly focused on helping teams of software developers build the most impactful software of the future which means always improving the developer experience and making GitHub as open and collaborative as possible.”

GitHub Actions are designed to let you implement custom logic without having to create a GitHub app. Actions can be combined to create workflows based on actions defined in your repository, a public repository on GitHub, or a published Docker container image. You can use Actions to express business rules, or to connect the services your project uses from inside your project's repository.

Actions can be customized, and they can use the GitHub API or any publicly available third-party APIs to interact with a repository. Actions can also be shared with the GitHub community, and you can search for and use Actions created by other GitHub users. You can add actions to your project by referencing them in your repository's workflow, and the actions you reference can be located in your own repository, or in any public repository on GitHub.  Actions can be connected by dragging and dropping a line to link them, and Workflows run when triggered by events on GitHub.

Alongside the launch of Actions, GitHub also announced GitHub Connect, a set of features designed to unify the developer experience across different GitHub organizations and deployment types. Developers can now connect their GitHub Enterprise account with their GitHub.com account to show Enterprise contributions on their public profiles. There's also better search so developers can search private repositories within their company’s business cloud instances.

A number of improvements related to security were also announced, starting with an extension to the security warnings issued if a known vulnerability enters a codebase. This was already available for JavaScript, Ruby and Python, and has now been added for Java and .NET. Other improvements to security include scanning of public repositories for known token formats, and a security advisor API that  provides security advisories as a public service.

More Information

GitHub Actions

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