Make GitHub Actions Do More For You

Most people just use GitHub Actions to run their tests. It can do far more: deploy a PR to production before merge, make release processes more robust and automate the boring chores you keep forgetting to do. Here are a few patterns I’ve used to make my life easier with GitHub Actions. I’ve done a bunch to evolve Homebrew’s CI over the years so hopefully I can teach you something. 🚀 Merge Queues with Deployments GitHub’s Merge Queue was the last big project I led at GitHub so I’m biased towards it. It provides a queue of one or more pull requests which are stacked, tested and merged together. At GitHub, we had a “deploy then merge” workflow where PRs would be tested and then deployed to production before being merged. Most of our customers had a “merge then deploy” workflow where merges to the default branch would then be deployed. I always liked the GitHub approach but doing it with non-GitHub tooling was a bit tricky. I found a nice way to do it with Merge Queues in Workbrew and…