Powering your CI/CD with GitHub Actions

Reusable workflows in GitHub Actions allow you to centralize and standardize a sequence of jobs that are common across multiple workflows. This facilitates maintenance, ensures consistency, and reduces duplication by allowing workflows to call other workflows with parameters for specific environments like development, staging, or production.

A reusable workflow in GitHub Actions is triggered using the 'workflow_call' event. You can define inputs and secrets that the calling workflow can pass to the reusable workflow, making it adaptable for different scenarios or environments.

Composite actions in GitHub Actions allow you to combine multiple steps into a single action. This enables you to reuse a set of steps across different jobs or workflows, simplifying your CI/CD configuration and promoting code reuse and maintainability.

No, you cannot directly use secrets within the definition of composite actions in GitHub Actions. Instead, secrets must be passed as inputs from the workflow that calls the composite action, ensuring security and confidentiality of sensitive data.

Parameters are passed to a reusable workflow in GitHub Actions through the 'inputs' section when defining the workflow_call event. These inputs are then accessible within the reusable workflow, allowing for dynamic execution based on the passed parameters.

Local actions are defined and used within the same repository as your workflow. Remote actions, on the other hand, are stored in a separate repository, which allows them to be shared across multiple repositories. This helps in maintaining a central repository of actions that can be updated and reused across numerous projects.

Sensitive data in GitHub Actions should be secured using secrets. Secrets are encrypted environment variables stored in GitHub and are only exposed to actions that are explicitly authorized to access them. They are ideal for storing data such as credentials, tokens, and keys.

The 'workflow_dispatch' event allows you to manually trigger a workflow directly from GitHub's UI. This provides flexibility to execute workflows on-demand, rather than only in response to code changes or other automated events.