Introduction

  • 3 minutes

When thinking about ways to add efficiency within your GitHub workflow, consider that you can build apps and integrations to improve and customize your workflow. By using GitHub Apps and OAuth Apps, you can help reduce the amount of time spent on manual tasks and customize your workflow to meet individual, team, and company needs. You can also share these integrations with others on GitHub Marketplace, and in return use apps and integrations built by other developers.

Suppose you're looking for a feature that GitHub doesn't yet support. Maybe you'd like to automate some of the more mundane tasks you deal with. For example, following up with contributors who didn't label an issue they created. Or automatically closing any branches or pull requests that remain untouched for months. Whatever your need is, you're probably not alone. The good news is that GitHub Apps offer a way for you to fill the gaps and automate processes in your repository. The better news is that the solution you need might already be built.

Optimizing the value of apps and features to manage users in your workflow can help speed up your processes while maintaining efficiency, security, and reliability. In this module, you learn about using these tools and their features.

In this module, you learn how to automate DevOps processes by using GitHub Apps that handle repetitive tasks, enforce team policies, and maintain a tidy repository.

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you'll:

  • Identify available GitHub Access Tokens needed to support GitHub users.
  • Understand how to monitor token rate limits.
  • Describe the capabilities, use cases, and differences of GitHub Apps and OAuth Apps.
  • Demonstrate your knowledge by installing a GitHub app in a GitHub repository.

Prerequisites

  • A GitHub account
  • The ability to navigate and edit files in GitHub

This module covers the automation of common GitHub tasks through GitHub Apps. To fully appreciate the benefits this module discusses, we recommend that you complete the following module first: