Building a pipeline with GitHub Actions

After learning about all the stages of CI, it is time to practice. Introducing you to all the features of one or more CI/CD tools is out of scope for this book; however, we still want to show you how easy it can be to set up a working build pipeline. To keep the barrier to entry as low as possible for you and to avoid any costs, we have decided to use GitHub Actions.

GitHub Actions is not a classic CI tool like Jenkins or CircleCI, but rather a way to build workflows around GitHub repositories. With a bit of creativity, you can do much more than “just” a classical CI/CD pipeline. We will only focus on that aspect, of course.

You probably already have a GitHub account, and if not, getting one will not cost you anything. You can use GitHub Actions for free up to 2,000 minutes per month at the time of writing for public repositories, which makes it a great playground or a useful tool for your open source projects.

Example...