Since launching in 2008, GitHub has become by far the largest place on the internet for hosting and collaborating on software code. The company, which is in the process of being acquired by Microsoft, now hosts more than 85 million projects, and boasts 31 million monthly users.
But while you’ve been able to store your code on GitHub, you couldn’t actually run it. For that you needed a web server or a cloud service. But today at its annual GitHub Universe event, the company announced that will now enable programmers to run certain types of software on its platform.
The company’s new offering, GitHub Actions, is designed to help developers automate the various tasks involved in managing their code, such as testing and technical support. GitHub head of platform Sam Lambert says the company’s users often write their own software and bots to handle tasks like automatically running a test when someone updates code or sending a text message to an on-call team member when someone submits a bug report. That requires running a separate server to handle these tasks, and, ultimately, more work writing and maintaining these sorts of support tools.
GitHub could try to offer these types of automation tools itself, but it couldn’t meet everyone’s needs, because different development teams have different requirements. Instead, it’s letting developers build their own tools from within GitHub.
Lambert describes GitHub Actions as being a bit like the consumer service IFTTT (“if this, then that”), which enables users to run certain actions (like posting a photo to Twitter) based on specific triggers (such as the appearance of a photo on your Instagram feed). With GitHub Actions, a development team can link a particular trigger (new code being uploaded to a project) to a particular action (running a series of tests). Users can also write more complex workflows as code. For example, you could configure four separate actions to run simultaneously, and a fifth action to wait until all four have completed before triggering.
The new service launches in beta today with 450 prebuilt “actions,” and will enable users to write their own actions as well, or bundle existing applications using the popular tool Docker to run on GitHub. For example, HashiCorp has built a version of its computing infrastructure tool Terraform that can run as a GitHub action.
Lambert says one big benefit of GitHub Actions is that teams will be able to codify and share work flows. That means that when it comes time to start a new project, a team could use an “off the shelf” workflow and customize to its own needs, rather than having to set up code-management tools from scratch.
It’s hard not to wonder if this is a way for GitHub to start muscling in on Microsoft’s competitors in the cloud computing market. But Lambert says the service has been in the works for more than a year, well before Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub was announced. And he doesn’t see GitHub Actions as a competitor to cloud computing services. GitHub Actions are only able to run for an hour at a time, and the company has imposed other limits to keep them from being used as a public facing web server. The idea is simply to run tools that developers use to write software, and not the final products those developers create.
Lambert admits that it’s possible that some GitHub users might find a way to run publicly facing web services from GitHub Actions, but says it won’t be an ideal way to do so. In fact, one of the main uses for GitHub Actions could be pushing code for those final projects from GitHub to run on cloud services such as Amazon, Google, and, yes, Microsoft Azure.
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Source:WIRED
