CI/CD with GitHub Actions
A complete 25-lesson CI/CD course built on GitHub Actions, diagram-first — from what continuous integration and delivery actually mean through workflow anatomy, triggers, caching, matrix builds, artifacts and secrets, then deployment environments and approvals, deployment strategies, rollback, pipeline performance, flaky tests and supply-chain security, closing with a full CI pipeline, a Docker build-and-push, and a staging-to-production pipeline with human approval.
25 Lessons · 750 min · Learning Platform Editorial Team
What you need on the desk
- A GitHub repository (public repos get free Actions minutes)
- A code editor (VS Code recommended) — workflow files are just YAML
- Optionally Docker, for the container build-and-push project
Know this much before you start
- Comfortable with Git basics — branching, commits, pull requests. This course does not re-teach Git (the Git tutorial on this site covers that); it starts where Git leaves off, at what happens automatically after you push.
- A GitHub account and any repository you can experiment in — everything here runs on GitHub's free tier for public repositories.
- Basic command-line familiarity, since every pipeline ultimately runs shell commands — but no prior CI/CD or DevOps experience is assumed.
By the end, you can
- Explain what CI, continuous delivery and continuous deployment each mean, and why conflating the last two causes real disagreements on a team
- Read and write a GitHub Actions workflow: triggers, jobs, steps, runners, contexts and expressions
- Use caching, matrix builds, artifacts and job outputs correctly — including why a bad cache key is worse than no cache
- Scope secrets and token permissions to least privilege, and explain why a fork's pull request cannot read your secrets
- Design a deployment path with environments, human approvals and a rollback plan, and choose between rolling, blue-green and canary
- Build real pipelines: a full CI pipeline, a Docker build-and-push to a registry, and a staging-to-production pipeline gated on approval