GitHub actions and productivity

[Gustavo Bonesso]

Hi Brent!

I never used GitHub Actions. Can you give some hints about how a Java Developer can be more productive using this tool? What are the benefits?

[Brent Laster]

Hi Gustavo, thanks for the question. So GitHub Actions is an automation platform/framework integrated with GitHub. If you store your Java code in a GitHub repository, then you could use Actions to automatically do items like CI/CD, deployment, security scanning and other automation with it through GitHub - similar to what you might have used Jenkins for in other circumstances. Workflows in Actions are like scripts or programs or Jenkinsfiles if you know Jenkins.

If you have a GitHub repository and go to and add "actions/new?category=none&query=java" onto the end of the repository URL, you can see the various starter workflows around Java (though you'll probably also see ones for Javascript as well).