---
title: Deploy with GitHub Actions
description: How to deploy a pipeline with GitHub Actions
keywords: [how to, deploy a pipeline, github actions]
---

# Deploy a pipeline with GitHub Actions

Before you can deploy a pipeline, you will need to:
  1. [Install dlt](../../reference/installation.md);
  2. [Create a pipeline](../create-a-pipeline.md);
  3. Sign up for a [GitHub](https://github.com) account, since you will be deploying using
[GitHub Actions](https://github.com/features/actions).

## Add your `dlt` project directory to GitHub

You will need a GitHub repository for your project. If you don't have one yet, you need to
initialize a Git repo in your `dlt` project directory and push it to GitHub as described in
[Adding locally hosted code to GitHub](https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/importing-your-projects-to-github/importing-source-code-to-github/adding-locally-hosted-code-to-github).

## Ensure your pipeline works

Before you can deploy, you need a working pipeline. Make sure that it is working by running

```sh
python3 chess_pipeline.py # replace chess_pipeline.py with your pipeline file
```

This should successfully load data from the source to the destination once.

## Initialize deployment
First, you need to add additional dependencies that the `deploy` command requires:
```sh
pip install "dlt[cli]"
```
Then, the command below will create a GitHub workflow that runs your pipeline script every 30 minutes:
```sh
dlt deploy chess_pipeline.py github-action --schedule "*/30 * * * *"
```

It checks that your pipeline has run successfully before and creates a GitHub Actions
workflow file `run_chess_workflow.yml` in `.github/workflows` with the necessary environment
variables.

## Add the secret values to GitHub

Copy and paste each `Name` and `Secret` pair printed out by the `dlt deploy` command line tool to
the GitHub UI located at the `github.com/.../settings/secrets/actions` link, which was also printed
out by the `dlt deploy` command line tool.

## Add, commit, and push your files

To finish the GitHub Actions workflow setup, you need to first add and commit your files:

```sh
git add . && git commit -m 'pipeline deployed with github action'
```

And then push them to GitHub:

```sh
git push origin
```

## Monitor (and manually trigger) the pipeline

The pipeline is now running every 30 minutes as you have scheduled. The `dlt deploy` command line
tool printed out a `github.com/.../actions/workflows/run_chess_workflow.yml` link where you can
monitor (and manually trigger) the GitHub Actions workflow that runs your pipeline in your
repository.

## Known limitations

The GitHub cron scheduler has a fidelity of ~30 minutes. You cannot expect that your job will be run
at the exact intervals or times you specify.

- The minimum official supported interval is 5 minutes.
- If you set it to 5 minutes, you can expect intervals between 5 and 30 minutes.
- From practical experience, any intervals above 30 minutes work on average as expected.