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DevOps / GitHub Actions Interview Questions

How do you use the actions/checkout action and what does it do?

actions/checkout clones your repository onto the runner so subsequent steps have access to your source code. Without it, the runner's working directory is empty — no source files, no scripts. It is almost always the first step in any CI job.

The simplest usage just checks out the default branch at the ref that triggered the workflow:

steps:
  - uses: actions/checkout@v4

Common configuration options via with::

  • ref: — Check out a specific branch, tag, or SHA. Useful when you need to build a release tag or compare against another branch.
  • fetch-depth: — Number of commits to fetch. Defaults to 1 (shallow clone). Set to 0 for a full history (needed for tools like git log or semantic-release that inspect commit history).
  • token: — Override the default GITHUB_TOKEN with a PAT when you need to push commits back or access private submodules.
  • submodules: — Set to true or 'recursive' to initialise Git submodules.
steps:
  - uses: actions/checkout@v4
    with:
      fetch-depth: 0          # full history for changelog generation
      submodules: recursive   # also clone submodules

The action authenticates using the workflow's GITHUB_TOKEN by default, so it works without any additional secret configuration for normal repository checkouts. For pull requests from forks it checks out a merge commit (the result of merging the fork's head into the base branch) rather than the fork's raw head commit, which prevents untrusted code from poisoning the checkout.

What fetch-depth value should you set in actions/checkout to retrieve the complete git history?
What happens if you omit actions/checkout as the first step in a CI job?

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