GitHub Actions: first impressions - Eli Bendersky's website

I've been using Travis CI fairly extensively since 2013, when I moved my personal OSS projects from Bitbucket to GitHub. It's a great service and a much-appreciated boon to the open-source community.

However, since Travis announced that their .org variant is shutting down soon, I wanted to check out some of the alternatives, and GitHub actions (GHA) seemed very interesting.

So this week I've migrated pycparser and a few of my other OSS projects over to GHA. This turned out to be very easy! Here's a brief recap.

Workflow configuration

To activate GHA for pycparser, all I had to do is create the following YAML file as .github/workflows/ci.yml in the repository:

name: pycparser-tests
on:
  push:
    branches:
      - master
  pull_request:
    branches:
      - master

jobs:
  build:

    runs-on: ${{ matrix.os }}
    strategy:
      matrix:
        python-version: [2.7, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8]
        os: [ubuntu-latest, macos-latest, windows-latest]

    steps:

    - uses: actions/checkout@v2
    - name: Set up Python ${{ matrix.python-version }}
      uses: actions/setup-python@v2
      with:
        python-version: ${{ matrix.python-version }}
    - name: Test
      run: |
        python tests/all_tests.py

Some notes:

This workflow fires on two kinds of events: pushes to the master branch and PRs to the master branch. Each PR will have an automatic CI run for each change (every new commit pushed).
It runs in multiple configurations: the cross-product of Python versions and OSes, as specified.
The run: entry is the command the runs the tests.
While pycparser doesn't have any dependencies, it's easy to have those too by adding pip install $whatever lines to run: before the actual test execution line.

First impressions

My first impressions of GHA compared to Travis:

Actions run much faster; the CI jobs schedule pretty much immediately. On Travis you might have to wait for multiple minutes.
Out-of-the-box Windows and Mac OS option! I couldn't get these with the free Travis variant and had to augment my CI solution for pycparser by running on Windows through AppVeyor. Now I only need to maintain a single CI workflow.
Travis seems to have better documentation and configurability at this point; while the GHA documentation is comprehensive, it's a bit scattered and harder to follow. This is something I hope will improve over time.

I like what I'm seeing from GHA so far; the ability to set up a CI workflow very easily without bouncing between multiple Web UIs is a blessing, and GHA appears to be a capable, performant platform with a convenient selection of OSes.

I'm still using Travis for some projects and will continue comparing the two over the coming months.