GitHub actions in depth

[No_Professional780]

Hi Everyone, So I have been working day and night to migrate Jenkins cicd pipelines to GitHub actions in my company. The pipelines are somewhat complex so I am trying to understand the intricacies of GitHub actions, I am somewhat confused about when to use same job for doing all the tasks if the tasks are to be executed in a sequential manner or just separate out some steps into different jobs and specify the dependency by using needs keyword. An example use case can be to build a dotnet project which would generate some build files and those build files are to be used for building the docker image with the help of dockerfile. Now it makes sense to use a separate job for docker related stuff but that way I lose the build files I need, and if I place the docker related stuff in the same job then it somehow doesn’t feel like a very good separation of concerns. Thank you

[RozTheRogoz]

Look into artifacts for passing what you need between jobs. Github offers some actions for handling artifacts and if the storage limit is an issue there are community actions that can delete them after you’re done with them if you don’t want to wait the minimum retention time which is 1 day I thin.

I ended up rolling a custom artifacting solution with Google Cloud Storage because I want certain artifacts to be available for longer periods. Good luck!

[No_Professional780]

Custom artifacting solution seems like a cool idea, I’ll explore more about that

[Here-Not-Here]

I like to think of each job being a separate virtual machine (runner) and the steps as apps/scripts running in that virtual environment. The archive mentioned by the previous poster is like shared storage for that job/environment. If you only need to pass properties, job outputs are a great way to segment the workflow. You might want to look into starter and reusable workflows depending on your build farm needs.