Deep Dive: Moving ruby projects from Travis to Github Actions for CI

So this is one of my super wordy posts, if that’s not your thing abort now, but some people like them. We’ll start with a bit of context, then get to some detailed looks at Github Actions features I used to replace my travis builds, with example config files and examination of options available.For me, by “Continuous Integration” (CI), I mostly mean “Running automated tests automatically, on your code repo, as you develop”, on every PR and sometimes with scheduled runs. Other people may mean more expansive things by “CI”.For a lot of us, our first experience with CI was when Travis-ci started to become well-known, maybe 8 years ago or so. Travis was free for open source, and so darn easy to set up and use — especially for Rails projects, it was a time when it still felt like most services focused on docs and smooth fit for ruby and Rails specifically. I had heard of doing CI, but as a developer in a very small and non-profit shop, I want to spend time writing code not setting up infrastructure, and would have had to get any for-cost service approved up the chain from our limited budget. But it felt like I could almost just flip a switch and have Travis on ruby or rails projects working — and for free!.