Maintainer Summit Europe 2025

"Maintenance involves functional checks, servicing, repairing, or replacing necessary devices, equipment, machinery, building infrastructure, and supporting utilities" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maintenance).

This definition from Wikipedia aptly describes what we, as maintainers, do. A significant portion of our time is spent on upkeep. While some of this work is enjoyable, many tasks are tedious and exhausting.

To alleviate this, we are exploring ways to automate some of these tasks. One popular option is incorporating GitHub Actions into our repository.

However, creating and updating GitHub Actions can be a challenging process. They are difficult to test, and even when tested in a forked repository, numerous issues can arise in production—such as expired or misconfigured tokens and missing permissions.

In this session, you will learn best practices for building GitHub Actions, discover how to avoid common pitfalls, and gain inspiration for automating routine maintainer tasks.