GitHub Actions Complete Course: Build Real-World CI/CD

Learn GitHub Actions step by step through practical demonstrations, real-world examples, and a complete Java Spring Boot CI/CD project.

This course is designed for anyone who wants to understand how GitHub Actions works and how it can be used to automate CI/CD workflows directly from a GitHub repository.

We will start with the fundamentals of GitHub Actions, including workflows, events, runners, jobs, steps, and workflow execution. From there, we will gradually move into practical concepts that are commonly used in real projects.

You will learn how to trigger workflows using different GitHub events, control workflow execution with conditions, configure job dependencies, work with environment variables and secrets, handle failures, and manage workflow execution.

We will also cover reusable workflows and composite actions so that you can avoid repeating the same configuration across multiple workflows. You will learn how to upload and download artifacts, understand caching, and work with both GitHub-hosted and self-hosted runners.

A major part of this course is a complete CI/CD pipeline for a Java Spring Boot application using GitHub Actions.

In this project, we will take the application through the complete delivery flow:

Source Code → Build → Test → Security Scanning → Docker → Kubernetes → Argo CD Deployment → Health Check → DAST

We will use Maven to build the Java Spring Boot application, run unit tests, and generate test and code coverage reports.

For code quality and security, we will work with tools such as SonarQube Cloud, Semgrep, Trivy, and ClamAV. These tools will help us perform code analysis, SAST scanning, dependency and filesystem vulnerability scanning, and malware scanning.

We will then create a Docker image for the application, scan the image using Trivy, authenticate with Docker Hub, and push the image to the container registry.

Before deployment, we will scan our Kubernetes manifests using KubeLinter and Kubescape to identify Kubernetes configuration issues, security risks, and compliance-related problems.

We will also create an AWS EKS cluster using Terraform. You will see how to securely authenticate from your local machine to AWS using AWS SSO / IAM Identity Center, create the required AWS infrastructure, connect to the EKS cluster using kubectl, and understand the overall AWS and Kubernetes access flow.

For deployment, we will install and configure Argo CD, connect it with GitHub, and deploy our Kubernetes application into the EKS cluster. We will also integrate Argo CD with GitHub Actions so the pipeline can trigger application synchronization and deployment.

After deployment, the pipeline will run an HTTP health check to verify that the application is actually reachable and working correctly.

Finally, we will use OWASP ZAP for DAST — Dynamic Application Security Testing, where the running application is scanned for web security issues and the scan reports are stored as GitHub Actions artifacts.

The course also includes practical integrations such as sending GitHub Actions workflow notifications to Slack and Microsoft Teams. You will also learn how to configure an AWS EC2 instance as a self-hosted GitHub Actions runner.

Throughout the course, we will create and run workflows directly in GitHub so that you can see how each concept works in practice. You will also see real workflow runs, errors, troubleshooting, security reports, deployment results, and complete CI/CD execution.

By the end of this course, you should have a clear understanding of GitHub Actions and be able to create, manage, troubleshoot, secure, and improve CI/CD workflows for your own projects.

This course is suitable for developers, DevOps engineers, cloud engineers, system administrators, and beginners who want to learn GitHub Actions through practical examples and understand how a complete CI/CD pipeline works in a real project.