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What

Clarified the definition of "action" in the Understanding GitHub Actions guide.

Why

The previous definition incorrectly described actions as "a set of jobs or code," which is misleading. Actions are custom applications used as steps within jobs, not collections of jobs themselves.

Changes

  • Updated line 82 to accurately define actions as "custom applications for the GitHub Actions platform"
  • Removed the inaccurate "set of jobs" phrasing

The previous definition incorrectly stated that an action is
'a pre-defined, reusable set of jobs or code.' This was misleading
because actions are not sets of jobs—they are reusable units of
code used as steps within jobs.

Updated the definition to accurately describe actions as custom
applications that perform specific tasks, aligning with GitHub's
official terminology.
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welcome bot commented Oct 28, 2025

Thanks for opening this pull request! A GitHub docs team member should be by to give feedback soon. In the meantime, please check out the contributing guidelines.

@github-actions github-actions bot added the triage Do not begin working on this issue until triaged by the team label Oct 28, 2025
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github-actions bot commented Oct 28, 2025

How to review these changes 👓

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Table of review links

Note: Please update the URL for your staging server or codespace.

The table shows the files in the content directory that were changed in this pull request. This helps you review your changes on a staging server. Changes to the data directory are not included in this table.

Source Review Production What Changed
actions/get-started/understand-github-actions.md fpt
ghec
ghes@ 3.18 3.17 3.16 3.15 3.14
fpt
ghec
ghes@ 3.18 3.17 3.16 3.15 3.14

Key: fpt: Free, Pro, Team; ghec: GitHub Enterprise Cloud; ghes: GitHub Enterprise Server

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@Sharra-writes
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@DanielDerefaka Thanks for the PR! This looks like a good update, with one little tweak to make it more general. We have a deploy freeze for GitHub Universe this week, but I'll get this merged once that's lifted.

@Sharra-writes Sharra-writes added content This issue or pull request belongs to the Docs Content team ready to merge This pull request is ready to merge github_actions Pull requests that update GitHub Actions code and removed triage Do not begin working on this issue until triaged by the team labels Oct 29, 2025
rajlanjewar01

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@Sharra-writes Sharra-writes removed the ready to merge This pull request is ready to merge label Oct 30, 2025
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@DanielDerefaka An engineer came and weighed in on this, and they aren't in favor of the change in definition, feeling that it would be confusing to use "application" when we also have GitHub and OAuth apps, and also that the term itself was too broad. It's possible the definition could use an update, but after their breakdown of what they didn't like about this definition, I can see why it is what it is. We would need one of our engineers to work with a writer to rewrite it so they could help pick and choose specific terminology that's not being used extensively elsewhere to mean other things.

All that is to say, I'm afraid I'm going to have to reject this one after all. I'm sorry about that! Some of the other people on my team are very familiar with Actions, so I thought it would be enough to ask them, but our actual engineers had the opposite opinion.

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3 participants