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GitHub Actions allow you to run code in your repository, on GitHub servers, after every push.

This can be used for many things. This article discusses how to use it for running tests (as a replacement for hosted CI services like travis.ci).

A GitHub Action is defined by a Dockerfile in some GitHub repository. Since you can have multiple actions, you create a directory for each action.

An action is triggered by a workflow description in .github/main.workflow file in a repository.

Workflow is specific to each repository, actions can be shared.

A workflow running time (a sum of all actions in a workflow) is limited to 1 hr.

Workflow

Here's the simplest workflow:

workflow "run go test on push" {
  on = "push"
  resolves = ["test"]
}

action "test" {
  uses = "kjk/siser/action-go-test@master"
}

Explaining workflow section:

run go test on push is human-readable name of the workflow. It documents what the action is for
on = "push" says that workflow will be executed on each push (including pushes into branches)
resolves = ["test"] specifies a list of actions to execute. We just have one and it refers to action "test"

For a full list of options see documentation.

Explaining: action section: