Benjamin Lannon

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GitHub Actions Hierarchy

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Going from complete setups down to the atomic level of a GitHub Actions workflow consists of 3 parts

Workflows

This is a complete setup. Think of it like an entire program that has many modules inside it doing various things.

Example: a complete CI process. It will spin up some environments, do some linting, run some tests, and do other various checks.

Jobs

These are individual chunks of tasks within a workflow. Think of them like functions that do one thing.

If there are multiple jobs in a workflow, they will run in parallel, but you can organize them so jobs are dependent on another job.

Example: a single portion of the CI, let's say just running the unit tests

Steps

This is the core of a job. this can be thought of as individual lines inside a function.

Example: individual items in the process of running unit tests like running npm test.