• [~aloraine], I created a sample pipeline that triggers when a push to the repository happens.
• The pipeline has only one single step, to execute the build command.
• I have attached the image of the pipeline.yml for your reference.
• The output generated by the action (pipeline.yml) can be found here.
• I would like to discuss the pipeline requirements with you in detail.
  

Notes for CI/CD Pipeline:

Architecture:

• Event: Events trigger workflows. Ex: push, pull-request.
• Workflow: A workflow is like a pipeline. It is composed of one or many jobs
• Runner: A physical or virtual hardware where the code for a workflow is executed. Each job can be executed on a different runner.
• Jobs: Jobs aggregate steps and define which runner to execute them on

Getting familiar with GitHub action clauses/keywords

• On: The on keyword and the lines that follow it define which types of triggers the workflow will match on and start executing
• Name: To define the name of the step or a Job
• Jobs: Composed of one or more steps
• Steps: Steps are the basic unit of execution. They consist of either invocations of predefined actions or a shell command to be run on the runner
• Uses: For pulling pre-defined actions from the internet (similar to using APIs that do the job for us).
• With: To pass parameters as an input to pre-defined action defined in the "Uses" clause
• Run: To execute shell commands

Workflow setup:

• Workflow files are written in YAML, and they must be located in the .github/workflows directory

Workflow of htsjdk-igb pipeline:

You can find the workflow file of htsjdk-igb here.

• This workflow gets triggered for push or pull-request event (The branch prefix must start with "igb-*".)
• GitHub provides an OS to execute the workflow ( look for runs-on step)
• actions/checkout@v3: pre-defined action for checking out a repo
• actions/setup-java@v3: pre-defined action to set up Java environment. This action requires input parameters, such as Java version and distribution, which are sent using the "with" clause.
• Now, the environment set-up is ready to build the project. The ./gradlew build -x test command is executed in run step
• Implemented a verification step to ensure the build/libs directory contains all jars, including Source and Java Doc.

Downloading Jars:

• After a successful build, you can able to view and download the artifact(see image).
  

Added detailed notes on GitHub actions and workflow. Let me know if you have trouble understanding them.

Moving to backlog as I do not have time to complete the work described above.