CI Pipeline with GitHub Actions

What is GitHub Actions?

GitHub Actions is a CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment) tool built into GitHub. It uses workflows which are specified in .yml files in .github/workflows/ directory of a repository. It lets you automate tasks such as building, testing, and deploying your code for example when pushing code to specified branch, creating a pull request or manually triggering a workflow.

There is a few key elements to workflow. It has to have a name, triggers have to be specified and it must conatin at least one job which includes steps that do certain things e.g. run unit tests.

My implementation of CI workflow

I setup my CI workflow, so it runs whenever I make a push or pull request to the 'main' branch. I can also run it on demand by added 'workflow_dispatch' statement. I added a path to make sure my workflow runs only when there was a code change in specified directory and it doesn't for example when I modify readme file in my repo.

name: Build Portfolio
    
on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  push:
    branches: [ "main" ]
    paths:
       - 'Portfolio/**'
  pull_request:
    branches: [ "main" ]
    paths:
       - 'Portfolio/**'
                            

There is only one job called 'build' with a few steps in my implementation and I specified Ubuntu to be environment it runs on. The rest of the steps:

• Check out the code from the repository so it can be used in the next steps.
• Install .NET SDK 8.0.x so my project can be built using that version.
• Restore all NuGet packages for my project.
• Build my project.

jobs:    
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v4

    - name: Setup .NET
      uses: actions/setup-dotnet@v4
      with:
        dotnet-version: 8.0.x

    - name: Restore dependencies
      run: dotnet restore

    - name: Build
      run: dotnet build --no-restore