DevOps Management

with GitHub
Table of Contents
Introduction to GitHub 03

What is GitHub? 03

Why GitHub? 03

Understanding the term Git and GitHub 04

Features of GitHub 05

Issues 05

Notifications 05

Branches 06

Commits 06

Pull Requests 06

Labels 07

Actions 07

Cloning and Forking 08

Build and deploy through GitHub Actions 09

Action Logs of Build 09

Artifacts & Artifact Storage 09

GitHub Actions to deploy to Azure 10

Control execution 10

GitHub Secrets 10

Deploy to Microsoft Azure using GitHub Actions 11

Create and delete Azure resources by using GitHub Actions 11

Main Benefits of using GitHub 12

Conclusion 13

Author Bio 13
 DevOps Management with GitHub 03
Introduction to GitHub
Since its inception in 2008, GitHub has continuously transformed the way people code,
making it easier to collaborate and develop elegant, disparate solutions for the market.
GitHub has grown and evolved from a version control system to a social utility for
programmers and finally to the place were code lives online.
It is a blessing in disguise for software developers by creating the most comprehensive
open-source platform facilitating cloud storage for source code, codeshare, networking,
publishing services, and code talks. Today millions of people around the globe use these
repositories. GitHub has achieved an incredible growth, and collaboration with Microsoft
has scaled it to a new height which has helped many users efficiently maintain complex
codebases.
This whitepaper provides you with a detailed guide about GitHub, and how you can
effectively deploy and manage your code using Git & GitHub.

What is GitHub?
GitHub is a well-known web-based open-source platform where users host git repositories.
It is a highly used software version control and is helpful when more than one person is
working on a project.

Why GitHub?
GitHub provides a centralized repository for the software development team to upload, edit,
and manage code files to help them build a website. Everyone can update their codes
simultaneously when working on the project. GitHub allows us to document the changes in
codes files and reflect them in a systemized manner to avoid disruption between any of the
files uploaded.
The GitHub centralized repository allows us to steer clear of all the confusion, and therefore,
working on the same code becomes effortless and free.
The most important feature of GitHub is “Forking”, copying a repository from one user’s
account to another. This helps you to take a project that you do not have right access to and
modify it under your account. If users want to make changes, they will need to share it with
the original owner by sending a notification called a “Pull request”. Then the owner, with one
click of a button, can merge the changes found in the repo with the original repo.
These three features – Fork, pull request, and merge – is what made GitHub more powerful.
 DevOps Management with GitHub 04

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Understanding the term Git and GitHub

Git is a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) that helps multiple developers and other
contributors work on the same project. It possesses a significant feature to work with one or
more local branches and helps them push to a remote repository. Git is responsible for
everything GitHub that happens locally on the user’s computer. Key features of Git include:

Installation and use on Handle and monitor Support and monitor

user’s local machine version control branching and policies

GitHub is a cloud platform that consumes GIT as its core technology. It streamlines the
collaboration process and provides a website, command-line tools, and overall flow that
allows software developers and users to work together. GitHub is a remote repository.
 DevOps Management with GitHub 05

Features of GitHub
Issues
Issues are where most of the communication between a client and the development team occurs.
An issue can be created to discuss a broad set of topics, including bug reports, feature requests,
documentation clarifications, etc. Once an issue is created, it can be assigned to owners, labels,
projects, and milestones. Developers can also associate issues with pull requests and other
GitHub items to provide future traceability.

Notifications
GitHub offers notifications for virtually every event that takes place within a workflow. These
notifications can be fine-tuned to meet all your preferences. As you can subscribe to all issue
creations and edits on a project, or you can just receive notifications for issues that mention you.
You can also decide whether you receive notifications via email, web & mobile, or both.
 DevOps Management with GitHub 06
Branches
Branches are the preferred way to create changes in GitHub Flow. They provide isolation so that
multiple people may simultaneously work on the same code in a controlled way. This model
enables stability among critical branches, such as “main”, while allowing complete freedom for
developers to commit any changes they need to meet their goals. Once the code from a branch is
ready to become part of the main branch, it may be merged via “pull request”.

Source: GitHub

Commits
A “commit” is a change to one or more files on a branch. Every time a commit is created, it is
assigned a unique ID and tracked along with the time and contributor. This provides a clear audit
trail for anyone reviewing the history of a file or linked item, such as an “issue” or “pull request”.

Pull Requests
A “pull request” is a way used to signal that the commits from one branch are ready to be merged
into another. The developer submitting the pull request will request one or more reviewers to
verify the code and approve the merge. These reviewers can comment on changes, add their
own, or use the pull request for further discussion. Once the changes have been approved (if
approval is required), the pull request's source branch (the compare branch) may be merged into
the base branch.
 DevOps Management with GitHub 07
Labels
Labels provide a way to categorize and organize issues and pull requests in a repository. As you
create a GitHub repository, several labels will automatically get added for you, and you can even
create a new one as well.

Examples of Labels include:

Bug Documentation Duplicate Help wanted Enhancement Question

Actions
GitHub actions provide task automation and workflow functionality in a repository. Actions can be
used to streamline processes in your software development lifecycle and implement continuous
integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD).

GitHub Actions are composed of the following components:

Events Steps Runners

An activity that A task that can Server that has the
triggers a run one or more GitHub Actions
workflow. commands runner application
(actions). installed.
Workflows Jobs Actions
Automated A set of steps that Standalone
processes added to execute on a commands that can
your repository. runner. be combined into
steps. Multiple
steps can be
combined to create
a job.
 DevOps Management with GitHub 08

Cloning and Forking

GitHub has vast features to provide multiple ways to copy a repository so users can work on it.

Cloning of a Repository Forking of a Repository

Cloning a repository will make a Forking a repository will make a
duplicate copy of the repository and duplicate copy of the repository in
its history on the user’s local the user’s GitHub account. Once
machine. If the user has the right users have successfully forked a
access to the repository, they can repository into the GitHub account,
push changes from their local they can clone it to their local
machine to the remote repository machine. Forking allows you to
(origin) when it is completed. Users make changes to a project without
can use the Git clones command or affecting the original upstream
GitHub to clone the repository. repository. Users can create a “pull
request” to contribute to the
upstream repository from your
forked repository. Git commands
can be used to ensure that the local
copy stays synced with the
upstream repository.
 DevOps Management with GitHub 09

Build and deploy through

GitHub Actions
GitHub Actions can be used to implement continuous integration (CI) for code that is maintained
in GitHub repositories. CI is the practice of using automation to build and test software every time
a developer commits changes to version control. CI helps teams discover issues early in the
development process and fix them quickly.
Several features are under development, and you must make sure the team can build and test
them easily so that each one can be quickly added to the website. Because the code for the
project is stored in a GitHub repository, you can use GitHub Actions for your CI project.
You can create a workflow from a template — that template has common jobs and steps
pre-configured for the automation you are implementing.

Action Logs of Build

Each time the workflow runs, it provides log information indicating whether your workflow
deployment was successful. If your workflow is successfully deployed, you will notice a check-
mark on the right; if your workflow fails, you will see a red ‘X’ symbol. Then, you can investigate
the reason for those errors/failures and fix them.

Artifacts & Artifact Storage

Workflow produces artifacts along with log entries. This artifact can be uploaded to storage using
the action actions/upload-artifact and downloaded from storage using the action actions/down-
load-artifact. Storing an artifact helps to preserve it between jobs. Each job uses a fresh instance
of a VM, so you cannot reuse the artifact by saving it on the VM. If you need your artifact in a
different job, you can upload the artifact to storage in one job and download it for the other job.
Artifacts are stored in storage space on GitHub. The space is free for public repositories, and
some amount is free for private repositories depending on the account. GitHub stores your
artifact for 90 days.
 DevOps Management with GitHub 10
GitHub Actions to deploy to Azure
Once you have completed the workflow for CI using GitHub Actions and the Artifact is generated,
then, with reference to the artifact, you can deploy it to Azure using GitHub features like:

Creating a trigger CD workflow with ChatOps: Using labels in your pull request:

ChatOps uses chat clients, chatbots, and Different labels can start different
real-time communication tools to execute workflows. Add a staging label to begin a
tasks. When you leave a specific comment deployment workflow to the staging
in a pull request, that can kick off a bot. environment or add a spin-up environment
That bot might comment back with some label to run the workflow that creates the
statistics or run a workflow. Microsoft Azure resources you will deploy.

Control Execution
Many developers want to run a workflow if some condition is true. GitHub workflows provide the
‘if’ conditional for this scenario. The conditional uses an expression that will be evaluated at run
time. For example, we want to run this workflow if a staging label is added to the pull request.

GitHub Secrets
GitHub Secrets is a secure place to store sensitive information that your workflow needs. The
GitHub Action must have permission to access the resource to deploy to an Azure resource. You
will need to store Azure credentials in plain sight in the workflow file. Instead, you can store your
credentials in GitHub Secrets.

To store any information in GitHub Secrets, you can create a “secret” on the portal. You can use
the name of the “secret” you created in your workflow wherever you need that information.
 DevOps Management with GitHub 11
Deploy to Microsoft Azure using
GitHub Actions
The GitHub Marketplace has several actions that help you automate Azure-related tasks.

You can search and browse GitHub Actions directly in a repository's workflow editor. You can
search for a specific Action from the sidebar, view featured Actions, and browse featured
categories.

To find an Action:
In your repository, browse to Click the edit icon in the Use the GitHub marketplace
the workflow file that you upper right corner of the sidebar to the right of the editor
want to edit. file view. to browse actions.

Create and delete Azure resources by

using GitHub Actions
CD is an automated process when you use the infrastructure as code to create and delete the
environment you want to deploy. GitHub Actions can automate these tasks on Azure, and you can
include these actions in your workflow. To avoid extra charges, you must delete resources you
have created if it is of no use.
One option is to create a new workflow with two jobs, one that spins up resources and deletes
them. Then, use a conditional to run only the job you want. In this example, the conditional looks
for a label in the “pull request”. It runs the set-up-azure-resources job if the label spins up the
environment and the destroy-azure-resources job if the label is destroyed.
 DevOps Management with GitHub 12
Remove workflow Artifacts from GitHub
By default, GitHub provides you 90 days of storage time for your build logs and uploaded artifacts
before deletion. This retention period can be customized based on the type of repository and the
usage limits set for your specific GitHub product. There is much more information regarding
usage limits, artifact retention, billing, and administration. If you are reaching your organization’s
storage limit for GitHub artifacts and packages, and you want to remove old artifacts without
increasing your usage limits and blocking your workflows, you can reclaim used GitHub Actions
storage by deleting artifacts before they expire on GitHub

You can do this in the following two ways:

Manually delete Artifacts Change the default

from your repository retention period

Main Benefits of using GitHub

The GitHub Marketplace has several actions that help you automate Azure-related tasks.

GitHub makes it easy to contribute to your open-source projects

01 As we all know, almost every open-source platform uses GitHub for managing their projects. If
your project is open source, then using GitHub is free. It includes wiki and issue tracker to make it
easy to include more in-depth documentation and feedback about your project. It will be
uncomplicated for you to contribute; you will just need to fork a project, make edits as per your
requirement, and create a “pull request” to merge using the GitHub web interface.

Integration Options
02 GitHub integrates with common platforms like Amazon and Google cloud, services like Code
Climate to track your feedback, and can highlight syntax in 200 different programming languages.

GitHub is a repository
03 GitHub allows you to showcase your projects in front of the public. GitHub is one of the largest
coding communities around the world, so it provides wide exposure to your project.

Showcase your work

If you are a developer who wants to attract more recruiters to your profile, then GitHub is the
04
best tool you can rely on for this purpose. This is because most companies investigate the GitHub
profiles when they search for new talents. So, if you are not from the best-ranked college/univer-
sity but have a well-versed profile on GitHub, you will have an amazing chance to showcase your
talent and get shortlisted and hired by top companies around the world.
 Documentation
DevOps Management with GitHub 13
05 GitHub provides you with excellent exposure to receive great documentation. The help section
and guides have articles on topics related to git that you may need and refer to for any project.

Markdown
06 Markdown allows users to use a simple text editor to write formatted documents. GitHub has
revolutionized writing by channeling everything through Markdown: from issue tracker, user
comments, and much more.

Track changes in code across different versions

07 When multiple developers collaborate on a project, it’s hard to keep track of all revisions—who
changed what, when, and where those files are stored. GitHub takes care of this issue by keeping
track of all the changes that have been pushed to the repository.

Conclusion
Git is an open-source version control system used for source code management in software
development and is rapidly gaining ground. Git is not specific to Azure DevOps – a collaborative
software development tools set. In fact, it is used by many platforms that provide source control
hosting as a service. GitHub’s extensive feature set for team-based software development and
its ease of use makes it a prominent platform of choice among coders and writers alike. It is also
one of the largest communities of coders around. In a nutshell, if you are all in about the commu-
nity and wish to build and collaborate on open-source projects with millions of diligent developers
worldwide, GitHub is just about the right platform for you.

Author Bio
Vandana Yadav has over 5 years of experience in the IT industry. She has
vast exposure to Azure Cloud services and has worked with many ventures
for their DevOps operations. Vandana is capable of handling CI/CD, infra
creation, Monitoring, certificates for security, Application deployments, azure
Repo, Git & GitHub, and recently she has worked on Migration services.
Before this, Vandana worked with MVP solutions, where she helped clients
enhance their infra for cost optimization and efficient services.

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