GitHub just released GitHub Actions, to "automate your workflow from idea to production." Their slogan:
Focus on what matters:
code
Here are some comments by Sarah Drasner on CSS-Tricks:
Previously, there were only few options here that could help with that. You could piece together other services, set them up, and integrate them with GitHub. You could also write post-commit hooks, which also help.
[...]
Actions are small bits of code that can be run off of various GitHub events, the most common of which is pushing to master. But it's not necessarily limited to that. They’re all directly integrated with GitHub, meaning you no longer need a middleware service or have to write a solution yourself. And they already have many options for you to choose from. For example, you can publish straight to npm and deploy to a variety of cloud services, (Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Zeit... you name it) just to name a couple.
But actions are more than deploy and publish. That’s what’s so cool about them. They’re containers all the way down, so you could quite literally do pretty much anything — the possibilities are endless! You could use them to minify and concatenate CSS and JavaScript, send you information when people create issues in your repo, and more... the sky's the limit.
You also don’t need to configure/create the containers yourself, either. Actions let you point to someone else’s repo, an existing Dockerfile, or a path, and the action will behave accordingly. This is a whole new can of worms for open source possibilities, and ecosystems.
Curious about how this all works? Take a look at CSS-Tricks tutorials: