GH-200: Automate your workflow with GitHub Actions

Course Title: GH-200T00-A — Automate Your Workflow with GitHub Actions

Course Description:

Boost productivity and streamline development with GitHub Actions, the powerful CI/CD and automation platform integrated directly into GitHub. In this hands-on, instructor-led course, you'll learn how to design, build, and manage end-to-end workflows to automate software development processes across your repositories.

Whether you're automating build and test pipelines, deploying code to cloud services, or managing complex workflows with events and secrets, this course equips you with practical skills to fully harness GitHub Actions in real-world scenarios. You'll walk away with the confidence to reduce manual work, improve code quality, and deliver software faster using DevOps best practices and GitHub-native automation.

Audience Profile:

This course is ideal for:

• Developers, DevOps engineers, and software engineers who use GitHub and want to implement automation and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD).

• IT professionals and technical leads looking to increase team productivity through GitHub-based automation.

• Professionals transitioning to DevOps or GitHub Enterprise environments.

Familiarity with Git, GitHub, YAML syntax, and basic CI/CD concepts is helpful but not required.

Course Outline:

Module 1: Introduction to GitHub Actions

• Understand the fundamentals of GitHub Actions and workflow automation.

• Explore use cases like CI/CD, DevOps pipelines, and automation for open-source and enterprise development.

• Learn the anatomy of a GitHub Actions workflow file.

Module 2: Creating and Running Workflows

• Create basic workflows triggered by events like pushes, pull requests, and schedule-based triggers.

• Use jobs, steps, and actions to build modular, reusable workflows.

• Configure workflow permissions and runner environments.

Module 3: Using GitHub-hosted and Self-hosted Runners

• Compare GitHub-hosted vs. self-hosted runners.

• Set up and scale custom runners for specific environments or performance needs.

• Secure runners for enterprise and team-based use.

Module 4: Managing Secrets, Environments, and Contexts

• Securely store and manage secrets using GitHub Actions.

• Configure environments with approval gates, protection rules, and custom deployment strategies.

• Use contexts to access repository, environment, and job information dynamically.

Module 5: Building Reusable Workflows and Composite Actions

• Create composite actions to encapsulate common automation logic.

• Use workflow reuse for scaling and managing complex automation pipelines.

• Implement DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principles in GitHub Actions.

Module 6: Continuous Integration with GitHub Actions

• Automate code builds and unit tests across multiple environments.

• Integrate with external tools for linting, testing, and quality gates.

• Build workflows that support matrix builds and conditional execution.

Module 7: Continuous Deployment and Delivery

• Deploy applications to popular platforms like Azure, AWS, and DockerHub using GitHub Actions.

• Use deployment strategies like canary, blue/green, and rolling deployments.

• Monitor and roll back failed deployments using GitHub’s deployment tracking features.

Module 8: Advanced Workflow Patterns and Optimization

• Optimize workflow performance with caching, artifacts, and concurrency controls.

• Manage workflow dependencies, outputs, and artifacts efficiently.

• Debug workflows using logs and the GitHub Actions visualizer.