Talk Summary: GitHub Actions for Perl Development

Speaker: Dave Cross

Dave Cross gives a discussion about GitHub Actions for Perl development.

Introduction

• Introduction to Cross and his extensive experience with Perl since 1990.
• Provides an overview of his work, including training courses, Pearl books, blogging, and ebooks.

GitHub Actions for Perl Development

• Cross discusses the purpose of GitHub actions for Perl development.
• Highlights the importance of continuous integration and continuous deployment.
• Discusses how to make code integration into the main branch as easy as possible by setting up automated checks.
• Mentions different CI and CD tools like Jenkins, Travis CI, Circle CI, and GitHub actions.

GitHub Actions

• Discusses the purpose of GitHub actions which is to run code or take actions in response to events that happen in your repository.
• Actions can run on Docker containers, and they are defined in a YAML file.
• GitHub actions has a marketplace where developers can reuse actions.

Prior Art

• There are only ten Perl actions available in the GitHub Actions Marketplace.
• Developers have also created their own actions, which can be reused.

Actions for Continuous Integration

• Describes actions for testing, looking at coverage, and linting.
• Discusses the use of a matrix in the YAML file to test the code on different operating systems and Perl versions.
• Talks about using existing actions from the marketplace to build a tarball and upload it.

Future Work

• Plans to add more measurements and make the output prettier.
• Working on a project called Perl Diver, which will build CI pages for your repository.
• Wants to create actions for releasing a module to CPAN.

Conclusion

• Cross has written a book about GitHub actions called “GitHub Actions Essentials”.
• He is open to help others implement these actions in their projects.
• Despite the presentation going over time, he is open to answering questions after the talk.