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Lesson 8 / 23

Jobs & Steps

Understand GitHub Actions jobs that run in parallel and steps that run in order on one runner.

Jobs run in parallel

A workflow can define multiple jobs (e.g. lint, test, build). By default they all start at once on separate runners, unless you use needs to make one wait for another.

Steps run in order

Within one job, steps run one after another on the same runner, sharing the same filesystem. If a step fails, the remaining steps in that job are skipped by default.

Workers with checklists

Jobs are like separate workers who can each start their own task at the same time. Steps are the checklist each worker follows top to bottom — they can't skip ahead to item 3 before finishing item 2.