GitHub Actions — Prerequisites

What to Know Before Starting GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions has one of the lowest barriers to entry of any CI/CD tool — no separate server to install or manage, since it's built directly into GitHub. The prerequisites are mostly about Git/GitHub fluency and YAML, not CI/CD infrastructure.

Required (Must Have)

1. GitHub Fluency

git clone, git push, git branch

Plus comfort with GitHub-specific concepts: pull requests, repository settings, and where Actions/Secrets live in the UI — workflows are triggered by GitHub events (push, pull_request), so understanding the PR workflow itself matters.

2. YAML Syntax

name: CI
on: [push]
jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

Every workflow lives as a YAML file in .github/workflows/ — the same baseline YAML comfort needed for GitLab CI/CD or any YAML-configured tool.

3. Basic Linux Command Line

GitHub-hosted runners default to Ubuntu — steps are typically shell commands:

ls, cd, cat, export

Nice to Have (Speeds Up Learning)

Prior CI/CD Tool Experience

If you've used Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, or CircleCI, the concepts (workflow, job, step, matrix build) transfer directly — Overview's own comparison ("Workflow vs Jenkins pipeline") is the fastest on-ramp if you already know Jenkins specifically.

Docker Basics

Many real-world workflows build and push container images — this site's Docker section covers the container fundamentals that make those steps make sense.

Cloud Provider Basics (For OIDC)

Module 03's OIDC-based cloud authentication (requesting short-lived credentials instead of storing long-lived cloud secrets) assumes basic familiarity with at least one cloud provider's IAM concepts (AWS IAM roles, Azure Managed Identity, or GCP Workload Identity).

What You Do NOT Need

Time Estimate

If you have the prerequisites above:

Start Here

Go to the Installation section to set up a self-hosted runner (optional — GitHub-hosted runners need no setup), then proceed to Fundamentals.