Your First CI Workflow Execution

Because some settings require your jobs to be executed to enable protection (GitHub does not automatically scan your yml files to identify the necessary jobs for these settings), you may need to run the initial CI workflow to set up the required configurations for branch protection.

1. Make sure you are still in the right project folder.

cd path/to/awsome-books

2. Create and switch to the config branch.

git checkout -b config

3. Make a commit and push to the remote config repository.

git add . && git commit -m "first config" && git push --set-upstream origin config

4. Go to the AWSome Books remote repository. Click Compare & pull request.

5. Click Create pull request.

6. A CI workflow might be triggred to verify your code. You are able to track the progress right from the pull request console.

7. Alternatively, go to the Actions tab and select the workflow that is currently running.

8. You can see a diagram that visualizes the relationships between jobs in your GitHub Actions workflow. The figure below illustrates how the jobs Build image, Run unit tests, Run integration tests, and Scan source code run in parallel, while the Scan image job depends on the completion of the Build image job.

Once all the jobs are complete, it should look like this.

Each job now have downloaded the necessary dependencies or libraries from the Internet rather than using the cache. Take note of the execution time for each job for comparison. You can later improve their execution time by implementing dependency caching.

9. Select Run unit tests job.

10. In addition to the steps you have defined in the yml file, there are many other steps within the Run unit tests job. You can review the execution time and detailed logs for each step here, which will help you debug and enhance your pipeline.

11. Click the Cache dependencies step. Since it is the very first time the CI workflow runs, you might see Cache not found for input keys.

12. After completing the primary steps, the “post” steps may run to handle tasks such as cleanup or cache writing.

For instance, if you click on the Post Cache dependencies step, you might notice that it saves the downloaded dependencies using a specific key.

13. Click CI button to navigate to list of CI workflow executions.

14. Click on Caches to access the GitHub Actions Cache (and remember this step for future reference when you need to navigate back).

15. For this pull request (refs/pull/1/merge), the cache should be successfully saved. As outlined in Section 3.1 Pipeline Design, any subsequent CI runs related to this pull request will leverage the saved cache for their jobs. This cache, however, is exclusive to this pull request and will not be accessible by other branches.

With GitHub Actions, you have built your first pipeline and made it run smoothly with just a few simple steps on GitHub!