Github Jenkins

Mon Jun 23 2025 11:42:44 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Over the past few months, I’ve been exploring an alternative to Jenkins: Github Actions.

It enables CI/CD workflow automation that integrates directly with any GitHub repository. As of now, it offers 2,000 CI/CD minutes per month for free on public repositories.

Here is how it works in practice:

1. Create a new file named .github/workflows/action.yml in your project.
2. Add the following basic action to check out the repository:

name: My Action Test
on:
  push:
    branches: ["master"]
  pull_request:
    branches: ["master"]
  workflow_dispatch: # Allow manual triggering
jobs:
  checkout:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - name: Checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v4

3. Push the changes to github repository. This will trigger the workflow action to execute.

Docker support

There are multiple actions that supports building docker images with cross-platform architectures by using matrix strategy. The possibilities for docker CI/CD is good and straightforward.

Conclusion

Many open-source repositories have adopted GitHub Actions, primarily due to the limited availability of Jenkins or its perceived complexity. During major incidents in 2023, Github suffered database cluster failure that resulted in widespread GitHub Actions workflow failures. There is great possibility of it happening again soon. Having an available Jenkins CI/CD that will not be affected by big tech outages is very important.