Go big with GitHub Actions

Scale up your data pipelines using GitHub’s powerful Actions framework

What you will learn

Work through this tutorial and you will gain hands-on experience creating automated systems that can collect, process and publish gigantic datasets with ease.

It will teach you how to:

• Schedule an automated task

• Scrape and store data from a newsworthy source

• Scale up to run hundreds of tasks in parallel

• Publish a data dashboard to share your work

• Extend GitHub’s free system to access mammoth amounts of computing power

Who can take it

This course is free. Previous experience working with GitHub will be useful, but anyone with a good attitude is qualified to take the class.

Table of contents

• 1. Introducing Actions
• 2. Introducing YAML
• 3. Creating your first Action
• 4. Scraping data on a schedule
• 5. Scaling up more servers
• 6. Deploying data dashboards
• 7. Beefing up bigger servers

About this class

Ben Welsh, Iris Lee and Dana Chiueh prepared this guide for a training session at the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting’s 2025 conference in Minneapolis. GitHub’s Copilot, an AI-powered text generator, provided some assistance. The materials are available as free and open source on GitHub.