Hello dev.to community! 👋
Yesterday, I explored Jenkins, a powerful and widely used CI/CD tool for automating pipelines.
Today, I’m diving into GitHub Actions, GitHub’s native CI/CD solution that makes automation seamless for developers.
🔹 Why GitHub Actions Matters
Since most projects already live on GitHub, GitHub Actions integrates directly with your repos to provide:
✅ Native CI/CD without extra setup
✅ Event-driven workflows (push, pull request, issue, schedule, etc.)
✅ Reusable workflows & actions from GitHub Marketplace
✅ Easy integration with cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure)
✅ Free hosted runners with Linux, Windows, macOS
🧠 Core Concepts in GitHub Actions
Workflow → Automation definition (YAML file in .github/workflows/)
Job → A set of steps that run in a runner
Step → A single task (e.g., build, test, deploy)
Runner → The machine where jobs run (hosted or self-hosted)
Actions → Reusable tasks (community-built or custom)
🔧 Example: Simple Workflow
name: CI Pipeline
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
build-test-deploy:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Checkout code
uses: actions/checkout@v4
- name: Set up Node.js
uses: actions/setup-node@v4
with:
node-version: '18'
- name: Install dependencies
run: npm install
- name: Run tests
run: npm test
- name: Deploy
run: echo "Deploying app..."
👉 Save this in .github/workflows/ci.yml and GitHub will trigger it automatically.
🛠️ DevOps Use Cases
Continuous Integration → Run tests on every commit
Continuous Delivery → Deploy to cloud or Kubernetes clusters
Infrastructure Automation → Trigger Terraform/Ansible workflows
Security & Compliance → Run scans with Trivy, Checkov, CodeQL
⚡ Pro Tips
Use secrets in GitHub for credentials (never hardcode them)
Reuse workflows across repos with workflow_call
Leverage GitHub Marketplace Actions instead of reinventing the wheel
Use matrix builds to test across multiple OS/versions
🧪 Hands-on Mini-Lab (Try this!)
1️⃣ Create a repo on GitHub
2️⃣ Add .github/workflows/ci.yml with the above workflow
3️⃣ Push code → watch the pipeline run in the Actions tab
4️⃣ Add a deploy step (Heroku, AWS, or DockerHub)
🎯 Key Takeaway
GitHub Actions brings CI/CD closer to your code, making automation simpler, faster, and developer-friendly. It’s a must-know tool for modern DevOps engineers.
🔜 Tomorrow (Day 20):
I’ll explore Docker — containerization to build, ship, and run applications anywhere.
🔖 #GitHubActions #DevOps #CI/CD #Automation #SRE
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