In this article, NatoBoram demystifies GitHub Environments and Deployments, describing what they are, how they work, and practical ways developers can use them for organizing secrets and deployment workflows.

Understanding GitHub Environments and Deployments

Author: NatoBoram

GitHub Environments and Deployments are features provided by GitHub to help structure and organize the automation and deployment processes within repositories. In this article, NatoBoram breaks down their true nature and describes practical use cases.

What Are GitHub Environments?

A GitHub Environment is essentially a named collection of Action secrets. You can create an environment (for example, my-nice-env) and place secrets inside it, like THAT_ENV_SECRET. This setup acts similarly to the broader Action secrets system but is scoped to the environment you define.

You can also specify conditions for when these secrets are accessible in workflows. Overall, environments provide a clear way to manage secrets relevant to specific deployment scenarios.

What Are GitHub Deployments?

A deployment in GitHub is simply a workflow run that uses the environment key in its configuration. For instance, a workflow job can specify:

jobs:
  deploy:
    environment: my-nice-env

Whenever this workflow executes, it’s recorded as a “deployment.” Deployments don’t require any special integration or functionality beyond referencing the environment; their primary function is to associate the workflow with a named context.

You can also attach a URL to a deployment for users to easily access the deployed application or artifact from the project’s UI.

Example Use Case: NPM Package Deployment

Consider a scenario where you want to deploy an npm package to both GitHub Package Registry and npmjs. You might create two environments, each with its own NODE_TOKEN secret corresponding to the relevant registry. Your workflow could then reference each environment in different jobs, enabling appropriate access to each secret during deployment.

When the workflow successfully runs, GitHub treats it as a completed deployment and provides a visual indication in the UI.

Practical Benefits

The main benefit of using GitHub Environments and Deployments comes from their UI and organizational features. By structuring secrets and deployments this way, you gain clearer visibility into your project’s automation activities and benefit from workflow boundaries and approval functionality.

Next time you set up a deployment via GitHub Actions, consider defining environments to group relevant secrets and enjoy improved traceability with those green checkmarks.

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