GitHub Actions is a workflow automation tool
Actions provide a way to automate, customize, and execute your software development workflows within your GitHub repository. Detailed documentation is available in the GitHub Actions Documentation.
- free unlimited minutes on public repos, 2000 minutes/month on private repos on free plan. More pricing details
- there’s loads of actions from the community or official from github that you can just use, search here. Pretty much everything uses the checkout V3 action
GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging work the way you want.
Kick off workflows with GitHub events like push, issue creation, or a new release. Combine and configure actions for the services you use, built and maintained by the community. Whether you want to build a container, deploy a web service, or automate welcoming new users to your open source projects—there’s an action for that. Pair GitHub Packages with Actions to simplify package management - https://github.com/features/actions
Loads of things can trigger actions, most useful is push, pull_request for normal development things, and schedule for regular/cron jobs.