Context

I need a Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) system to automate testing, linting, and deployment. For a personal project, the priority is zero-maintenance, zero-cost (for public repos), and tight integration.

I have previous experience with several alternatives:

• Semaphore CI: Found it functional but often too restrictive and opinionated in its pipeline definition compared to modern flexible workflows
• Bitbucket Pipelines: I liked the "Docker-container-per-step" model, which ensured a clean environment for every command. However, it is vendor-locked to Bitbucket, and this project is hosted on GitHub to maximize visibility ("Build in Public")

Other potential alternatives include CircleCI, which is a robust option but requires setting up a separate platform and managing separate users/billing.

I need a solution that minimizes administrative overhead ("Minimize Platforms") while maintaining local reproducibility.

Decision

I decided to use GitHub Actions.

This aligns with:

1. Minimize Platforms: The CI is the platform. Code, issues, PRs, and builds live in a single URL namespace. There is no "go to the CI dashboard" step—the logs are right in the Pull Request
2. Mise Integration: Instead of relying on a complex web of third-party Actions (vendor lock-in), I use Mise to strictly define the toolchain. The CI workflow becomes a thin wrapper: mise install && mise run ci. This ensures that what runs in CI is exactly what runs on my laptop
3. Cost Efficiency: It is completely free for public repositories
4. Escape Hatches: The workflow syntax allows for plugging in alternative runners. If I encounter performance bottlenecks or cost issues (on private repos), I can swap the default runners for Blacksmith (faster/cheaper runners) or offload Docker builds to Depot without rewriting the pipeline logic
5. Good Enough: It is not the most powerful CI in the world, but it is "good enough" for the current scale. The investment in mise ensures that if I hit the scaling limits, migrating to CircleCI or others is trivial

Consequences

Pros

• Identity Federation: supports OIDC (OpenID Connect) natively, allowing me to authenticate with AWS/GCP/Cloudflare without managing long-lived static secret keys
• Community Support: Every issue I encounter has likely been solved and documented widely due to the massive user base

Cons

• Debuggability: Logic in YAML is brittle. Tools like act claim to allow local testing of workflows, but in practice, they often fail to reproduce complex environment or networking issues. By leaning on mise, I mitigate this—if a script fails in CI, I can run the script locally, but debugging the workflow YAML itself remains a slow "commit-push-fail-repeat" cycle
• Scalability & Analysis: GitHub Actions lacks deep insights into test flakiness or historical run times compared to dedicated platforms like CircleCI. It creates a "wall of text" logs that are hard to search
• Vendor Lock-in: The workflow syntax (.github/workflows/*.yml) is proprietary. Migrating to GitLab CI would require a rewrite of the pipeline wrapper (though the underlying mise tasks would remain portable)
• Docker Handling: While robust, it doesn't default to the "clean container per step" model as aggressively as Bitbucket Pipelines, sometimes leading to state pollution in the runner workspace if not careful