Learning GH Actions -- BitBucket Pipelines

[Sean Corfield]

Hi Brent,

In the ToC for your book, there's a chapter about migrating to GH Actions. I see several CI systems mentioned but not BitBucket Pipelines (Atlassian).

What advice would you give to someone using BitBucket Pipelines in terms of a possible migration to GH Actions?

[Brent Laster]

Hi Sean, thanks for the question. I focused in that chapter on the systems that the GitHub Actions team had included some automation for via the migration tool discussed in the chapter.  I personally have very little experience with BitBucket and no experience with BitBucket pipelines unfortunately.  With that said, the overall general approach outlined in that last chapter should help in terms of preparation and the stages of source, CI, users, etc.

For the actual conversion, I would suggest looking at basic structures/processes (such as calling a shell command or checking out code) and then implementing small jobs in a GitHub Actions workflow to do that one targeted piece. Then you can start to build up from there to the larger pipelines. If you need to do fairly straightforward migrations for sections of pipelines, you could write custom scripts to search for the BitBucket pipelines and create the new GitHub Action pieces. I would suggest this could be a time-consuming process if you're just working on it yourself for a group effort.  If that's the case, I'd suggest getting the team some training in GitHub Actions and then breaking up the typical functions of your pipeline so each team member works on implementing a corresponding job in a GHA workflow and then all can benefit from the shared knowledge. Hope this helps.