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Getting Started with GitHub Actions

Welcome to GitHub Actions​

GitHub Actions is a CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment) platform built directly into GitHub. It lets you automate software workflows — running tests, building Docker images, deploying to servers — all triggered by events in your repository.

No separate CI service to configure. Your pipeline lives alongside your code, in the same repo.

What is CI/CD?​

Continuous Integration (CI) means automatically running tests every time code is pushed, so bugs are caught before they reach production.

Continuous Deployment (CD) means automatically deploying the tested code to production (or staging) without a manual step.

GitHub Actions handles both, using simple YAML files stored in .github/workflows/.

Why GitHub Actions?​

  • Zero setup — already integrated with every GitHub repo
  • Free tier — 2,000 minutes/month for public repos, 500 for private
  • Marketplace — thousands of pre-built actions for common tasks
  • Matrix builds — test across multiple OS/language versions simultaneously
  • Secrets management — store API keys and credentials securely

What You'll Learn​

  • Workflow syntax — on, jobs, steps, uses, run
  • Triggers — push, pull_request, schedule, workflow_dispatch
  • Runners — GitHub-hosted (Ubuntu/Windows/Mac) and self-hosted
  • Actions — reusing community-built steps from the Marketplace
  • Secrets — storing and accessing sensitive values in workflows
  • Deploy workflows — SSH to a server, push to EC2, deploy to Vercel

Prerequisites​

  • A GitHub repository
  • Basic YAML syntax knowledge
  • Understanding of what you want to automate (tests, linting, deployment)