How to Commit and Push Inside a GitHub Actions Workflow

GitHub Actions is an API for cause-and-effect on GitHub. It allows you to automate your workflows directly from your repository, providing custom continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) capabilities. In this article, we will delve into the process of committing and pushing inside a GitHub Actions workflow, with practical examples of pushing into the same repository and a different repository.

GitHub Actions: An Overview

Before we dive into the step-by-step guide, it’s important to understand the basic concept of GitHub Actions. GitHub Actions make it easy to automate all your software workflows with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Moreover, they allow you to write individual tasks (actions) that can be combined to create a custom workflow.

Workflows are custom automated processes that you can set up in your repository to build, test, package, release, or deploy any code project on GitHub. These workflows can be triggered by various events on GitHub, such as pushing code to a repository or opening a pull request.

Committing and Pushing Inside a Workflow

Here are the steps to perform commits and pushes inside a GitHub Actions Workflow. Please note that all the steps should be written in a YAML file inside the .github/workflows directory of your repository.

Pushing to the Same Repository

Step 1: Setting up the workflow

name: Push to same repo
on: [push]

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - name: Checkout code
      uses: actions/checkout@v2

name: Push to same repo

on: [push]

jobs:

build:

runs-on: ubuntu-latest

steps:

- name: Checkout code

uses: actions/checkout@v2

In the YAML file, we have defined a workflow that triggers on a push event. We are using the latest Ubuntu environment for our job. The first step is checking out the code using the actions/checkout action.

Step 2: Perform your actions

Here you can perform any actions that change your code, like running a script.

    - name: Run script
      run: |
        echo "Hello, World!" > hello.txt

- name: Run script

run: |

echo "Hello, World!" > hello.txt

Step 3: Set up user information

Before pushing your changes, it’s important to configure the user who will perform the commit.

    - name: Set up Git user
      run: |
        git config --local user.email "action@github.com"
        git config --local user.name "GitHub Action"

- name: Set up Git user

run: |

git config --local user.email "action@github.com"

git config --local user.name "GitHub Action"

Step 4: Commit and Push

Now, we are ready to commit and push the changes. This can be accomplished using the git commit and git push commands.

    - name: Commit and push
      run: |
        git add -A
        git commit -m "Add Hello World"
        git push

- name: Commit and push

run: |

git add -A

git commit -m "Add Hello World"

git push

Pushing to a Different Repository

Pushing to a different repository requires a slightly different approach, but the core concept remains the same.

Step 1: Checkout the target repository

You need to check out the repository you want to push to. To do so, use the actions/checkout action. Here, you need to provide a PAT (Personal Access Token) that has write access to the target repository. The token should be stored as a secret in your repository.

    - name: Checkout target repo
      uses: actions/checkout@v2
      with:
        repository: username/repo
        token: ${{ secrets.PAT }}

- name: Checkout target repo

uses: actions/checkout@v2

with:

repository: username/repo

token: ${{ secrets.PAT }}

After this, the rest of the steps are the same as pushing to the same repository.

Conclusion

Committing and pushing inside a GitHub Actions workflow opens up a new range of possibilities for automating your workflows. It enables a powerful way to perform changes in a repository based on some events or triggers. We hope this tutorial has helped you in understanding this process.

Remember, automation saves time and prevents human errors. Explore GitHub Actions to automate and optimize your workflows.