Git & GitHub · Quick Reference

Lesson 8 — GitHub Actions & CI/CD Cheat Sheet

Git & GitHub

In one line: CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment. It's the practice of automatically running tests and deploying code every time changes are pushed — removing the...

Key Ideas

1What is CI/CD?. CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment. It's the practice of automatically running tests and deploying code every time changes are pushed — re...

2GitHub Actions Concepts. GitHub Actions is GitHub's built-in automation platform. You write YAML files that describe what should happen and when. GitHub runs them on managed virtual machines c...

3Your First Workflow. Create a file at .github/workflows/hello.yml in your repository. GitHub automatically detects it and runs it when the trigger fires.

4Real CI Pipeline — Node.js. Here's the standard CI workflow used by Node.js projects worldwide. It checks out code, installs dependencies, and runs tests automatically on every push and PR.

5Automated Deployment to GitHub Pages. GitHub Pages hosts static sites for free directly from your repository. Combined with Actions, you can auto-deploy on every push to main — no FTP, no manual uploads.

Code Examples

# Workflow name — shown in GitHub UI
name: Hello World

# Trigger: run on every push to any branch
on: push

jobs:
  greet:
    # The virtual machine to run on
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      # Step 1: check out your repository code
      - use...

name: CI

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
  pull_request:
    branches: [main]

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      # 1. Check out repository code
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4

      # 2. Set up Node.js environment
      - uses:...

name: Deploy to GitHub Pages

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]

# Allow GitHub Pages deployment
permissions:
  contents: read
  pages: write
  id-token: write

jobs:
  deploy:
    environment:
      name: github-pages
      url: ${{ steps.deployment.outputs...