Handy Workflows for Managing Your Software

This book’s concluding chapter marks the culmination of our journey through GitHub Actions. Throughout this book, we’ve explored various facets of GitHub Actions, equipping ourselves with the knowledge and skills to seek relevant information and craft solutions tailored to our needs, ensuring security, efficiency, and a personalized experience.

In this final chapter, we’ll delve into practical workflows that are essential in software development, enabling you to conduct quality checks and ensure your software’s integrity by creating a software bill of materials (SBOM). Additionally, we’ll provide a curated list of valuable resources, including highly recommended actions by the community, to enhance your workflow designs.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following topics:

• Exploring commit and pull request linters
• SBOM generation as part of release management
• Your actions toolkit...

Technical requirements

To follow along with the hands-on material in this chapter, you will need to follow the steps in the previous chapter or access the resources from that chapter and refer back to it if anything is ambiguous to you. We will be stepping through the process of creating everything else in this chapter.

Exploring commit and pull request linters

In Chapter 7, we discussed how to create linters for Bicep files. In this section, we’ll be focusing on two linters specifically designed to enhance code description quality, both of which play a role in validating pull requests (PRs):

• Commit linters: This linter is responsible for ensuring that the commit messages within a PR adhere to a certain convention. This section will also explore how effectively this linter functions when run on the client side.
• PR linters: This linter checks whether the PR meets specific standards in terms of categorization and the quality of its title and body.

First, we’ll investigate PR linters in detail and consider their role in vetting and categorizing PRs.

PR linters

Incorporating a PR linter into the review process is vital for upholding code quality and facilitating efficient change management. Linters in PRs act as automated guardians, ensuring submissions adhere to...

SBOM generation as part of release management

GitHub increasingly enhances the visibility of your repository’s current status through its insights feature, which is available for organizations and individual repositories. However, one limitation is the inability to easily track the specific version of software running in a release, particularly when branches and deployed versions diverge. Understanding the composition of your software’s supply chain is essential for effectively communicating about significant updates or identifying areas that require patches.

For repositories with advanced security features or Dependabot enabled, Dependency graph in the Insights tab offers supply chain insights. This feature visually represents the repository’s dependencies and allows an SBOM to be generated via a simple button click:

Figure 16.5 – Dependency graph

While this is helpful, it becomes challenging when we’re dealing with...

Your actions toolkit

You’ve reached the final section of this chapter – congratulations on your perseverance and dedication! So far, our journey has been about building a solid understanding of various platform events, showcasing platform capabilities, and introducing fundamental concepts and action patterns. These insights are designed to empower you to implement widespread changes efficiently or easily deploy crawlers using actions in a reusable manner.

As you move forward, you’re now well-equipped to handle diverse use cases that come your way. However, it’s natural to question whether your approach is optimal: Have others solved similar problems? Are there better methods? What should be your next steps? I will share a collection of valuable resources to address these questions and enhance your knowledge of actions. These tools and knowledge sources, which I’ve accumulated over the years, have significantly contributed to refining my working...

Summary

As we close the final chapter of this comprehensive guide on GitHub Actions, you must recognize the breadth of knowledge and practical skills you have gained. This book has covered a lot regarding GitHub Actions and other cloud technology. Hopefully, it has equipped you with the tools and insights necessary to master GitHub Actions. For those eager to dive into the subject further, there are many more resources on platforms such as GitHub and Microsoft Learn. Moreover, for individuals looking to validate their newly acquired skills, GitHub offers specific certifications, including GitHub Foundations and GitHub Actions certifications. Achieving these certifications not only serves as a testament to your expertise but also strengthens your professional credentials in the field of software development and automation.

If this book has played a role in your journey toward achieving certification, I encourage you to share your success story. Let others know how this guide has...