Migrating Jenkins Pipelines to GitHub Actions

Continuous integration and automation are the lifelines of modern development. But what happens when your tried-and-true Jenkins pipelines start to feel slow, siloed, or hard to maintain? This course is your practical roadmap for migrating from Jenkins to GitHub Actions—the cloud-native CI/CD platform transforming how development teams build, test, and deploy code. Through hands-on demonstrations, code walkthroughs, and powerful tooling, you'll master both the principles and the practicalities of a successful migration, taking your pipelines from clunky to cutting-edge.

Course Outline:

Migration Overview

Kick off with a practical introduction to CI/CD and the motivation for moving from Jenkins to GitHub Actions. You’ll compare the two platforms, unpack the distinct advantages, and face the common challenges encountered during migration. By the end of this section, you'll have clear reasons for embracing GitHub Actions and a realistic understanding of the migration journey ahead.

Review Jenkins

Take a guided tour through Jenkins fundamentals, covering essential concepts, project types, and the anatomy of a Jenkins pipeline. Delve into the Jenkinsfile structure, compare declarative and scripted pipelines, and examine how Jenkins handles environment variables, secrets, artifact storage, and testing. You’ll also identify the plugins your projects rely on—crucial knowledge for any migration.

GitHub Actions

Step into the world of GitHub Actions by exploring its core workflow components—jobs, steps, triggers, and reusable actions from the Marketplace. Hands-on labs will walk you through creating and running your first workflows, helping you quickly get comfortable with this modern automation platform.

Manual Migration

Get practical with side-by-side pipeline conversions, learning how to translate Jenkins directives to GitHub Actions syntax. Transform simple and multi-stage pipelines, recreate parallel and matrix builds, and map artifact storage, secrets, and environment variable strategies onto your new platform. This section empowers you with all the skills you need for hands-on, manual workflow migration.

GitHub Actions Importer

Discover how automation accelerates your migration using the GitHub Actions Importer tool. You’ll get step-by-step guidance on installation, auditing, dry-runs, and the full migration cycle—including handling unsupported Jenkins features with custom transformers. You’ll then integrate, test, and validate your new GitHub Actions workflows, rounding out your skillset for even the most complex enterprise migrations.

Target Audience:

This course is ideal for DevOps engineers, CI/CD pipeline maintainers, software developers, and technical leads looking to modernize legacy automation, streamline deployments, and boost collaboration with GitHub’s native tooling.

By the end of this course, you’ll have the expertise, tools, and confidence to execute a seamless transition from Jenkins to GitHub Actions—future-proofing your pipelines and accelerating your team’s productivity.