GitHub is launching a service named "Actions" that promises to add unending layers of complexity to your code – in the best way possible. The company is also bringing openness to the enterprise via Connect, which bridges the private and professional lives of developers. Announced at Universe, they're GitHub's first major new products since being acquired by Microsoft, and they may just change how you work in a real and positive way. GitHub Actions is the “biggest” product the company has made since it launched, Sam Lambert, GitHub’s Head of Platform, tells Dice. He also (excitedly) suggested the company has “taken everything you love” about the platform and “attached it to code.” The site is typically where developers go to find projects or tools that help make their own apps or services better. It’s a platform of dependencies critical to our workflows. Actions is in line with this; it allows any cloud container to be added to a code repository via a single-line call. You can include just about anything you might find useful for programming in a container (testing, messaging about the status of pull requests, checking to make sure the right HEX codes are used, etc.) and add it to your own repository. GitHub Actions can be shared and made publicly available (or kept private), much like Gists. If you wrote a testing platform for an iOS app, you could host it via Docker (or any major container-hosting platform, really) and share it with the community at-large. Actions can also be versioned; if I were using version 3.2 of your testing service for my own apps, I could keep doing so indefinitely while you continued updating the platform for your own needs. [caption id="attachment_184149" align="aligncenter" width="1000"] 
GitHub Actions[/caption] Because GitHub Actions are a sort of micro-dependency, they can also be strung together. Lambert likened them to Siri Shortcuts, where lighter, strung-together Shortcuts can be cobbled together to build a larger contained service. You could include smaller Actions in a larger container as a ‘workflow,’ or simply call each to your repo as needed. GitHub tells Dice it will also suggest Actions to you based on your repo makeup, and adding Actions will be available programmatically (again, via the one-line call to a container) or via the user interface (likely a drag-and-drop system). In making container-hosted services a plug-and-play option for repositories, GitHub is trying to change the paradigm of how we work in open source. Imagine uploading a repository; GitHub notices you haven’t written unit tests, and offers up an Action that takes care of that. All you have to do is call the container. Now imagine your repository goes GitHub-viral and is downloaded or forked dozens of times the next day. You could call an action that notifies you when someone forks your repo, and stars it automatically so you can keep tabs. Later, you might add a few more Actions and create your own workflow. Developers love using libraries and frameworks. Github Actions is reminiscent of CocoaPods, just a lot more useful and far simpler to implement. It could actually be transformative. [caption id="attachment_140550" align="aligncenter" width="2048"] 
GitHub Offices, San Francisco[/caption]
GitHub Actions[/caption] Because GitHub Actions are a sort of micro-dependency, they can also be strung together. Lambert likened them to Siri Shortcuts, where lighter, strung-together Shortcuts can be cobbled together to build a larger contained service. You could include smaller Actions in a larger container as a ‘workflow,’ or simply call each to your repo as needed. GitHub tells Dice it will also suggest Actions to you based on your repo makeup, and adding Actions will be available programmatically (again, via the one-line call to a container) or via the user interface (likely a drag-and-drop system). In making container-hosted services a plug-and-play option for repositories, GitHub is trying to change the paradigm of how we work in open source. Imagine uploading a repository; GitHub notices you haven’t written unit tests, and offers up an Action that takes care of that. All you have to do is call the container. Now imagine your repository goes GitHub-viral and is downloaded or forked dozens of times the next day. You could call an action that notifies you when someone forks your repo, and stars it automatically so you can keep tabs. Later, you might add a few more Actions and create your own workflow. Developers love using libraries and frameworks. Github Actions is reminiscent of CocoaPods, just a lot more useful and far simpler to implement. It could actually be transformative. [caption id="attachment_140550" align="aligncenter" width="2048"] GitHub Offices, San Francisco[/caption]
