Open-source software repository provider GitHub Inc. todayk announced some important updates to GitHub Actions, which is a set of prebuilt commands that enable developers to automate their software workflows.

Launched about six months ago, GitHub Actions is meant to help to shape how communities build and share automation for software development. It includes a full continuous integration and continuous delivery or CI/CD solution for DevOps and native package management.

“GitHub Actions puts powerful CI/CD and automation directly into the developer workflow,” Jeremy Epling, senior director of product management at GitHub, wrote in a blog post.

In a nutshell, GitHub Actions enables teams to automate almost any kind of development workflow by taking advantage of thousands of different “actions” available in the GitHub Marketplace.

“There’s an action for almost everything, including: Kubernetes deployments, linting, SMS alerts, or automatically assigning and labeling an issue — and it keeps growing every day,” Epling said.

In total, the GitHub Marketplace is home to more than 3,200 different Actions, including hundreds that were built by third-parties such as Docker Inc., HashiCorp., Tencent Cloud and others.

Today’s updates bring new, enterprise-focused features to GitHub Actions, including the ability to share and manage self-hosted runners via new policies and labels. With this, large teams and enterprises can now centralize their core infrastructure management operations, GitHub said.

GitHub has also worked to improve the overall user experience for developers. Some of the main improvements include:

• Run defaults allow users to set shell and working directory defaults in their workflows, streamlining workflow files and decreasing likelihood of errors.
• An explicit “include” matrix gives more flexibility to customer-specific legs of a parallel set of jobs, commonly used for platform specific customization.
• Job outputs allow a workflow to easily pass data to downstream jobs, adding flexibility to how developers automate their work.

Epling also promised further upgrades in the future focused on helping developers standardize their workflows across organizations. Upcoming features to look out for include the ability to share and manage secrets across multiple repositories and more advanced continuous deployment capabilities. GitHub is also working closely with customers to bring GitHub Actions and Packages to its GitHub Enterprise Server offering.

Image: GitHub