Most people meet GitHub Actions as “the thing that runs tests on pull requests.” But under the hood it’s much more general: a computer that wakes up when something happens, runs whatever you tell it, and goes back to sleep. For public repos, it’s free. Here are things you can do with it that have nothing to do with CI. How it works in 30 seconds A workflow is a YAML file in .github/workflows/. It has: ...
Every repo has a .gitignore. Almost nobody has a .gitattributes. That’s a shame, because this one small file controls how Git sees, diffs, merges, normalizes, and exports your files. Once you know what it can do, you’ll want one in every project. What it is .gitattributes is a plain text file that assigns attributes to paths. Each line is a pattern followed by one or more attributes: *.sh text eol=lf *.png binary docs/** linguist-documentation The patterns work much like .gitignore, with two catches. Negation (!pattern) isn’t allowed. And a directory pattern like vendor/ does not apply to the files inside it, so you need vendor/**. ...