Self-Hosting Jenkins CI/CD with Docker: A $6/Month Alternative
GitHub Actions is fantastic. It's a popular choice for Continuous Integration—push code, run tests, merge PR. But as any experienced engineer eventually discovers, it has its limits.
Maybe you have a complex web scraper that runs for 4 hours. Maybe you need to run model post-training jobs that exceed the 6-hour timeout. Maybe you have a scheduled task that requires a persistent file system. Or maybe you're just tired of debugging opaque YAML files that fail silently on obscure timeouts.
I found myself needing to supplement my GitHub Actions workflow with something more robust for scheduled operations. I wanted the Hybrid Strategy: let GitHub handle the PR checks, but move the heavy, long-running, and custom scheduled jobs to a dedicated server I control.
In this post, I'll walk through how I deployed a production-ready, containerized Jenkins server on DigitalOcean for the price of a fancy coffee.
The Hybrid CI/CD Philosophy
This isn't about replacing GitHub Actions—it's about complementing it. Use GitHub Actions for what it does best: PR checks, testing, and short-lived workflows. Use self-hosted Jenkins for:
- Stateful jobs that need to remember data from the last run
- Heavy cron jobs that would eat through free-tier minutes
- Long-running processes like model post-training or data pipelines that exceed GitHub's 6-hour timeout
- Debugging flexibility where you can SSH in to investigate issues