Nobody likes repetitive tasks. So why should you run all your tests manually with every new code or—even worse—check that the new code didn’t break your build process? Yeah, I know you want to spend your precious time on shiny features without having to waste hours tweaking your build pipeline. Or maybe you have excuses like “I would have to pay for the automation” or “It’s time-consuming to prepare pipelines, and I don’t have time for it.” It’s not necessary to spend hours setting up your automation pipelines. Check out this guide and spin up a GitHub Action for your favorite stack fast—like Stack Overflow copy & paste fast.

TL;DR If you are familiar with GitHub Actions, you can skip the theory and jump to the specific stack in the Examples section below.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

Let’s start with the basics. The terms might sound very technical at first. However, the basic concept is quite simple. Continuous integration is the automation of building and testing. This means that typically, with some code changes, the machine checks whether it’s possible to build the project and whether your tests are passing. Continuous delivery is a little bit broader. To sum it up, this automation process will deploy or publish your code to various environments. This might be a little bit abstract and connected with the nature of your project, but you can visualize it as publishing to package registries like NPM or Nuget—or deploying your site to a staging or production environment.

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions are the feature of GitHub that consists of the API and an environment for running your tasks. You just need to create a YAML file at a specific location in the repository. The configuration .yml file contains all the specific information about the environment, such as  trigger events,  jobs, or strategies. Additionally, you can choose the environment where you want to run your tasks—it might be Linux (Ubuntu), Windows (Windows Server), or even macOS (Big Sur or Catalina).

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