Laravel GitHub Actions: Automating Your Development Workflow with Ease

GitHub Actions is a powerful tool that allows developers to automate a wide range of software development workflows directly from their repositories. In this article, we will explore how you can use GitHub Actions to automate your Laravel development workflows and improve your development speed and efficiency.

Getting Started with GitHub Actions for Laravel

To get started, you’ll need to have a GitHub account and a Laravel project hosted on GitHub. If you don’t have a Laravel project, you can create one using the Laravel installer:

composer global require laravel/installer
laravel new my-laravel-project

Once you have your Laravel project hosted on GitHub, you can start using GitHub Actions to automate your development workflows. The first step is to create a new GitHub Actions workflow. You can do this by navigating to the Actions tab in your GitHub repository and clicking on the “New workflow” button.

Defining Your Workflow with GitHub Actions for Laravel

GitHub Actions workflows are defined using YAML files, which are stored in the .github/workflows directory of your repository. In this section, we will look at a simple example of a GitHub Actions workflow for Laravel that runs your tests every time you push changes to your repository.

Here’s the YAML file for our example workflow:

name: Laravel Tests

on:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - uses: actions/[email protected]
    - name: Set up PHP
      uses: actions/[email protected]
      with:
        php-version: 8.0
    - name: Install dependencies
      run: composer install --no-interaction --no-ansi --no-progress --no-scripts
    - name: Run tests
      run: composer test

This workflow is triggered every time you push changes to the main branch of your repository. The workflow runs on an Ubuntu virtual machine and includes the following steps:

Checkout your code from GitHub
Set up the PHP environment
Install your Laravel dependencies using Composer
Run your Laravel tests using Composer
You can customize this workflow to fit your specific needs by adding or modifying steps as needed. - For example, you could add a step to build and deploy your Laravel application to a server, or to run static analysis tools like PHPStan or Psalm.

Happy coding! 😇