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Build GitHub Actions with Typescript
They’re fast and they run everywhere
Published in
3 min readDec 12, 2019
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GitHub Actions is a CI/CD platform
GitHub Actions (as for other CI/CD services/platforms):
- Triggers on events
- Prepare environment(s)
- Runs workflow(s)
- Report results
A GitHub Action can either be a Dockerfile or Javascript
In a Dockerfile action:
- The environment is defined by container layers
- The workflow is defined by entry point bash script
In a JavaScript action:
- The environment is defined in the
package.json
, as NPM modules - The workflow is defined by the JavaScript/TypeScript code
JavaScript actions are faster and more stable
The strength of JavaScript actions, compared with Dockerfile actions, are:
- The familiar syntax for most web/mobile/back end developers
- Runs everywhere (JavaScript is less restrictive than Docker)
- Runs faster by skipping container building and VM warm-ups.