What is GitHub Actions?

How CI/CD and automation work on GitHub — and what you can do with them.

First launched in 2018 as a platform-native automation tool, GitHub Actions has evolved to give developers powerful automation and CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment) capabilities right next to your code in GitHub.

GitHub Actions is designed to help simplify workflows with flexible automation and offer easy-to-use CI/CD capabilities built by developers for developers.

Compared with other automation or CI/CD tools, GitHub Actions offers native capabilities right in your GitHub flow. It also makes it easy to leverage any of the 10,000+ pre-written and tested automations and CI/CD actions in the GitHub Marketplace as well as the ability to write your own with easy-to-use YAML files.

The best part? GitHub Actions responds to webhook events. That means you can automate any workflow based on a webhook trigger in your GitHub repository—whether it's from an event on GitHub or from a third-party tool.

In this guide, we'll explore the following:

What are GitHub Actions and how do they work? Everything technical you need to know about GitHub Actions and how its automation and CI/CD features work.
Who can use GitHub Actions? What's included in GitHub's free and paid plans.
What can you do with GitHub Actions? Common ways other developers are using GitHub Actions to simplify their workflows.

The benefits of GitHub Actions

A powerful array of functionality and features to aid your developer experience

Automate everything in the GitHub flow
Create your own actions or use readily available ones on the GitHub Marketplace to integrate your preferred tools right into your repository.
Hosted VMs on multiple operating systems
Build, test, and deploy code on Ubuntu Linux, Windows, and macOS — or all three at the same time.
Pre-written CI templates, ready to use
GitHub Actions brings CI directly to the GitHub flow with templates built by developers for developers, plus support for custom CI and CD workflows.
Simple container and OS testing
With Docker support and hosted instances of Ubuntu Linux, Windows, and macOS, it's simple to build and test code across systems and automate those workflows.
Free on public repositories
GitHub Actions is free on all public repositories, and free on private repositories up to 2,000 hosted minutes a month — unlimited if you host your own server.