Getting started with a workflow To help you get started, this guide shows you some basic examples. For the full GitHub Actions documentation on workflows, see "Configuring workflows." Customizing when workflow runs are triggered Set your workflow to run on push events to the main and release/* branches on: push: branches: - main - release/* Set your workflow to run on pull_request events that target the main branch on: pull_request: branches: - main Set your workflow to run every day of the week from Monday to Friday at 2:00 UTC on: schedule: - cron: "0 2 * * 1-5" For more information, see "Events that trigger workflows." Manually running a workflow To manually run a workflow, you can configure your workflow to use the workflow_dispatch event. This enables a "Run workflow" button on the Actions tab. on: workflow_dispatch: For more information, see "Manually running a workflow." Running your jobs on different operating systems GitHub Actions provides hosted runners for Linux, Windows, and macOS. To set the operating system for your job, specify the operating system using runs-on: jobs: my_job: name: deploy to staging runs-on: ubuntu-22.04 The available virtual machine types are: ubuntu-latest, ubuntu-22.04, or ubuntu-20.04 windows-latest, windows-2022, or windows-2019 macos-latest, macos-13, or macos-12 For more information, see "Virtual environments for GitHub Actions." Using an action Actions are reusable units of code that can be built and distributed by anyone on GitHub. You can find a variety of actions in GitHub Marketplace, and also in the official Actions repository. To use an action, you must specify the repository that contains the action. We also recommend that you specify a Git tag to ensure you are using a released version of the action. - name: Setup Node uses: actions/setup-node@v4 with: node-version: '20.x' For more information, see "Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions." Running a command You can run commands on the job's virtual machine. - name: Install Dependencies run: npm install For more information, see "Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions." Running a job across a matrix of operating systems and runtime versions You can automatically run a job across a set of different values, such as different versions of code libraries or operating systems. For example, this job uses a matrix strategy to run across 3 versions of Node and 3 operating systems: jobs: test: name: Test on node ${{ matrix.node_version }} and ${{ matrix.os }} runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }} strategy: matrix: node_version: ['18.x', '20.x'] os: [ubuntu-latest, windows-latest, macOS-latest] steps: - uses: actions/checkout@v4 - name: Use Node.js ${{ matrix.node_version }} uses: actions/setup-node@v4 with: node-version: ${{ matrix.node_version }} - name: npm install, build and test run: | npm install npm run build --if-present npm test For more information, see "Workflow syntax for GitHub Actions." Running steps or jobs conditionally GitHub Actions supports conditions on steps and jobs using data present in your workflow context. For example, to run a step only as part of a push and not in a pull_request, you can specify a condition in the if: property based on the event name: steps: - run: npm publish if: github.event_name == 'push' For more information, see "Contexts and expression syntax for GitHub Actions."