Member-only story

Build GitHub Actions with Typescript

They’re fast and they run everywhere

Tianhao Zhou
Better Programming
3 min readDec 12, 2019
Photo by Ruca Souza from Pexels

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.

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