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GitHub Actions are somewhat underutilized tools that can supercharge app development. If you haven’t used them before, we highly recommend that you do so, especially with open source projects (since they have unlimited build minutes). With just a few lines, you can automate tasks that you would otherwise have to do manually with each build, save some time, and prevent errors!
Our favorite GitHub Actions to use with Flutter app projects are:
- Flutter GitHub Action: Gives you access to the Flutter command line so that you can format, analyze, and test your flutter code. It also allows you to specify which version and channel of flutter you want to use so that you can run your tests against the stable, beta, dev, or master channels.
- Upload Artifact: Upload coverage reports and visual architecture documents to GitHub. We use this to upload a visual representation of the app architecture, test coverage reports, and other important docs we may want to view after a workflow has run.
- Very Good Coverage: We made this one to keep track of our test coverage and ensure that we’re not slipping below our 100% threshold. You can specify any threshold up front to ensure that your coverage never dips below your desired limit. Check out how we built it in this blog post.
- Simple cspell: We use this one to run a quick spell check on builds. Unknown words are displayed as annotations so you can review and update any spellings accordingly. Don’t worry, you can whitelist any unique words so they don’t get flagged.
How to use GitHub Actions
First, view the full documentation for GitHub Actions. Once you’re ready, specify a workflow yaml file with the actions you want to use, then build and push changes as usual — it’s that simple!
