Actions allows users in your enterprise to improve productivity by automating every phase of the software development workflow.
| Task | More information |
|---|---|
| Automatically test and build your application | About continuous integration with Actions |
| Deploy your application | About continuous deployment with Actions |
| Automatically and securely package code into artifacts and containers | About packaging with Actions |
| Automate your project management tasks | Using Actions for project management |
Actions helps your team work faster at scale. When large repositories start using Actions, pull requests are typically merged faster, allowing teams to merge more pull requests per day.
You can create your own unique automations, or you can use and adapt workflows from our ecosystem of over 10,000 actions built by industry leaders and the open source community. You can restrict your developers to using actions that exist on your Enterprise Server instance, or you can allow your developers to access actions on .com. For more information, see About using actions in your enterprise.
Actions is developer friendly, because it's integrated directly into the familiar experience.
You can control your own private CI/CD infrastructure by using self-hosted runners. Self-hosted runners allow you to determine the exact environment and resources that complete your builds, testing, and deployments, without exposing your software development cycle to the internet. For more information, see About self-hosted runners.
Actions provides greater control over deployments. For example, you can use environments to require approval for a job to proceed, restrict which branches can trigger a workflow, or limit access to secrets. If your workflows need to access resources from a cloud provider that supports OpenID Connect (OIDC), you can configure your workflows to authenticate directly to the cloud provider. OIDC provides security benefits such as eliminating the need to store credentials as long-lived secrets. For more information, see About security hardening with OpenID Connect.
Actions also includes tools to govern your enterprise's software development cycle and meet compliance obligations. For more information, see Enforcing policies for Actions in your enterprise.
Before you get started, you should make a plan for how you'll introduce Actions to your enterprise. For more information, see Introducing Actions to your enterprise.
If you're migrating your enterprise to Actions from another provider, there are additional considerations. For more information, see Migrating your enterprise to Actions.
Actions is not enabled for Enterprise Server by default. After you finish planning, you can follow the instructions for enabling Actions. For example, you may need to upgrade the CPU and memory resources for your Enterprise Server instance. For more information, see Getting started with Actions for Enterprise Server.