Workflows

Get a high-level overview of GitHub Actions workflows, including triggers, syntax, and advanced features.

In this article

About workflows

A workflow is a configurable automated process that will run one or more jobs. Workflows are defined by a YAML file checked in to your repository and will run when triggered by an event in your repository, or they can be triggered manually, or at a defined schedule.

Workflows are defined in the .github/workflows directory in a repository. A repository can have multiple workflows, each of which can perform a different set of tasks such as:

  • Building and testing pull requests
  • Deploying your application every time a release is created
  • Adding a label whenever a new issue is opened

Workflow basics

A workflow must contain the following basic components:

  1. One or more events that will trigger the workflow.
  2. One or more jobs, each of which will execute on a runner machine and run a series of one or more steps.
  3. Each step can either run a script that you define or run an action, which is a reusable extension that can simplify your workflow.

For more information on these basic components, see Understanding GitHub Actions.

Diagram of an event triggering Runner 1 to run Job 1, which triggers Runner 2 to run Job 2. Each of the jobs is broken into multiple steps.

Workflow triggers

Workflow triggers are events that cause a workflow to run. These events can be:

  • Events that occur in your workflow's repository
  • Events that occur outside of GitHub and trigger a repository_dispatch event on GitHub
  • Scheduled times
  • Manual

For example, you can configure your workflow to run when a push is made to the default branch of your repository, when a release is created, or when an issue is opened.

For more information, see Triggering a workflow.

Next steps

To build your first workflow, see Creating an example workflow.