github-actions-cicd

A guide for GitHub Actions, GitHub’s built-in system for running automated jobs such as tests, builds, and deployments. It covers workflow design, security, caching, secrets, and deployment environments.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to create, review, or troubleshoot CI/CD workflows for linting, testing, building, deploying, using cloud authentication, and protecting staging or production environments.
Why use it?
It helps make automation reliable and safer by organizing jobs, limiting permissions, handling secrets, and diagnosing failures. It also supports workflows that run on pushes, pull requests, schedules, or manual requests.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/jenreh/appkit/github-actions-cicd
Any agent
npx skills add jenreh/appkit --skill github-actions-cicd
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/jenreh/appkit

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 98 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,421 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00098 $0.01421
Opus 5 $0.00049 $0.00711
Sonnet 5 $0.00020 $0.00284
Haiku 4.5 $0.00010 $0.00142

Measured 2d ago against content hash 22056bc20051, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

github-actions-cicd scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.claude/skills/github-actions-cicd/SKILL.md · 172 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 172 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

GitHub Actions CI/CD Skill

When to Use

  • Creating a new CI/CD workflow from scratch
  • Auditing an existing workflow for security, performance, or correctness
  • Debugging a failing or misbehaving workflow
  • Designing deployment strategies (rolling, blue/green, canary)
  • Configuring secrets, OIDC, or environment protections

Mode: Create

1. Gather Requirements

Ask (or infer from context):

  • Trigger events: push, pull_request, workflow_dispatch, schedule?
  • Language/runtime (Python, Node.js, etc.) — determines setup actions and cache paths
  • Test stages needed: unit, integration, E2E?
  • Deployment target: cloud provider, registry, k8s?
  • Environments: staging + production with manual approval gates?

2. Scaffold Structure

name: <Descriptive Name>
on: ...
concurrency:
  group: ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.ref }}
  cancel-in-progress: true
permissions:
  contents: read  # least privilege default
jobs:
  lint:   ...
  test:   ...
  build:  ...
  deploy: ...

3. Apply Checklist per Job

  • runs-on: ubuntu-latest (or justified alternative)
  • actions/checkout@v4 with fetch-depth: 1
  • Cache keyed on hashFiles('**/lockfile') with restore-keys fallback
  • All uses: pinned to full commit SHA or major version tag (@v4, not @main)
  • timeout-minutes set for long-running jobs
  • Secrets via ${{ secrets.NAME }} — never hardcoded

4. Security Gates

  • Least-privilege permissions block at workflow + override at job level
  • OIDC for cloud auth (prefer over long-lived keys)
  • dependency-review-action on PRs targeting default branch
  • CodeQL or Bandit for SAST on push/PR

5. Deployment Configuration

  • Use environment: blocks with protection rules for staging/prod
  • Manual approval required for production environment
  • Store rollback artifact version as job output; document rollback command in workflow comment

Mode: Review (Audit Checklist)

Run through these checks on any existing workflow:

Read the full file on GitHub · 172 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 172 lines · 98 tokens per session scan A 22056bc20051

Subscribe to this mod's changes

github-actions-cicd is a skill published in the GitHub repository jenreh/appkit (4 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 98 tokens to every session and 1,421 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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