Automating workflows with GitHub Actions

Danny Morris 2021-02-23 1 min read

GitHub Actions will make it easy to automate and orchestrate the execution of code to build and deploy our software. For our purposes, we will use GitHub Actions to trigger the execution of production code sequentially across multiple repositories to automate our daily build.

GitHub Actions runs “workflows” in response to one or more “events”. Common event types to trigger workflows include:

  • schedule events, i.e. cron expressions run workflows at specific times
  • push events, i.e. a commit is pushed to the repo and runs the workflow
  • worflow_dispatch, e.g. the completion of a workflow in one repository triggers the execution of a workflow in another

Using GitHub Actions for our project

For our project, we will strive for the following production workflow sequence:

  1. The dssquad-datakit codebase runs via a schedule event at [insert time] each day.

  2. Upon completion, a worflow_dispatch event is triggered to run the dssquad-ml codebase.

  3. Upon completion, another worflow_dispatch event is triggered to run the dssquad-app codebase.