Job
ELI5 — The Vibe Check
A job is one chunk of work in your pipeline, running on its own machine. If your pipeline is a school day, jobs are the different classes — math, english, science — each happening in a different room. Jobs can run at the same time (parallel) or one after another (sequential).
Real Talk
A job is a set of steps that execute on the same runner in a CI/CD workflow. Jobs within a workflow can run in parallel by default, or sequentially using needs: dependencies. Each job gets a fresh environment, so you must explicitly share files between jobs via artifacts.
Show Me The Code
jobs:
test:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- run: npm test
deploy:
needs: test # Only runs if test passes
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- run: npm run deploy
When You'll Hear This
"The deploy job is blocked because the test job failed." / "Run the lint and test jobs in parallel to save time."
Related Terms
Action
An action is a reusable mini-program that does one specific thing inside your pipeline. Instead of writing the same 20 lines to set up Node.
Pipeline
A pipeline is like an assembly line at a factory.
Runner
A runner is the actual computer that does the work when your pipeline runs.
Step
A step is the smallest unit of work in a pipeline — a single command or action.
Workflow
A workflow is a recipe for your robot assistant — it tells CI exactly what to do when something happens. 'When someone pushes code, run tests.