What are github actions and do we need them or is it just more tooling?

Product Analyst

GitHub Actions is GitHub's built-in automation system, and whether you need it depends on what you're currently doing to test and deploy your code — or not doing, if you don't have that infrastructure yet. The basic concept is that GitHub Actions lets you define workflows in YAML files that live in your repository, and those workflows run automatically in response to events. The most common event is a push or pull request — when code is pushed to a branch or a pull request is opened, a workflow runs that does whatever you've defined: running your test suite, building a container image, checking code style, deploying to a staging environment, or any other repeatable process your team needs to run on code changes. The workflow runs on GitHub's infrastructure without any server setup required on your end. An Action is a reusable unit of work that you compose into a workflow. GitHub's marketplace contains thousands of pre-built actions contributed by both GitHub and the community, covering common needs like setting up a specific programming language runtime, authenticating to a cloud provider, deploying to a hosting service, sending a Slack notification, or publishing a package to a registry. Building a workflow that runs your tests on every pull request and then deploys to production on merge to main can be done by composing existing actions without writing much automation code from scratch, once you understand the YAML structure. The case for needing GitHub Actions is straightforward: if your team has no automated way to run tests on code changes, people will push changes that break things without catching it before it's in production. If deploying your application involves manual steps — connecting to a server, pulling code, restarting a process — GitHub Actions can automate those steps so deployment is triggered by a merge rather than a manual operation. Those two capabilities — automated testing on pull requests, and automated deployment on merge — are the baseline that most engineering teams want, and GitHub Actions is the most natural place to implement them if your code is already on GitHub. The case for not needing GitHub Actions specifically is if you already have a CI/CD system you're happy with — Jenkins, CircleCI, Travis CI, GitLab CI, or something else — and your workflows are already running well there. GitHub Actions doesn't need to be adopted if an existing system is working. Actions also imposes some GitHub-specific YAML structure that takes time to learn, and for complex pipeline requirements, other CI/CD systems may have features or integrations that better fit specific needs. For teams starting fresh, GitHub Actions has the advantage of requiring no additional account setup, no separate billing relationship, and no integration plumbing between your CI/CD tool and GitHub — it's already there. The free tier on GitHub includes a meaningful monthly allocation of Actions minutes for private repositories, and public repositories receive unlimited free minutes, which means the cost of getting started is low.