GitHub Actions for .NET: Build, Test, and Deploy Your API

A complete guide to CI/CD for .NET developers — automated builds, test runs, Docker images, and deployments to Azure using GitHub Actions from scratch. Introduction: Why CI/CD Is Not Optional Every time you push code manually, run tests by hand, or deploy by copying files to a server, you're introducing risk. Human steps fail. They get skipped under pressure. They're not reproducible. CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment) solves this by automating the entire path from a git push to a running application. Every commit is built. Every build is tested. Every successful build on main can be deployed automatically. GitHub Actions is the most natural CI/CD tool for .NET developers on GitHub. It's free for public repositories, deeply integrated with the GitHub ecosystem, and has a growing marketplace of pre-built actions. You write workflows in YAML, they run on Microsoft-hosted runners with .NET pre-installed, and you pay nothing for most use cases. In this article I'll walk