What you will learn
- Break work into stages
- Run jobs in parallel
- Pass artifacts between stages
New to this? Start here
The basics, in plain English
A pipeline is built from stages that run in order, and jobs inside each stage. Defining them in a file means the whole process is written down, version-controlled, and repeatable.
- Stage
- A phase of the pipeline, like “build” then “test” then “deploy”.
- Job
- A unit of work inside a stage, such as running the test suite.
- Step
- A single command inside a job.
- Runner
- The machine that actually executes the pipeline’s jobs.
- Trigger
- The event that starts the pipeline, usually a push or a pull request.
01
Stages
A pipeline is a sequence of stages (build, test, deploy), each with jobs. Parallelize independent work to keep feedback fast.
Try it yourself
yaml
jobs:↳The set of jobs this workflow runs. test:↳A job named “test”. runs-on: ubuntu-latest↳Run on a fresh Ubuntu runner. steps:↳The ordered steps inside the job. - uses: actions/checkout@v4↳Check out your repository code. - run: npm ci && npm test↳Install dependencies, then run the tests.↳ lines explain what each command does — only the commands get copied
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