Thank you. So does CI/CD require becoming dependent on a cloud service such as github?

Not necessarily, it just depends on how invested you are in the CI/CD pipeline for any given project, your preferences regarding self-hosting vs. cloud, and the amount of time you have to dedicate to the subject.

Strictly speaking, any tool or set of tools that allow you to trigger building & deploying/publishing artifacts in response to source control commits can be used to build a CI/CD pipeline. One could write bash scripts linked to a cron job that pulls a remote repository every n minutes and then performs some scripted actions to integrate changes between branches before building & publishing the artifact to a local SFTP server.

If you prefer a more mature solution with better documentation however, there is a (non-exhaustive) list of CI/CD tools on this awesome-devops list:

https://github.com/wmariuss/awesome-devops#continuous-integr...

---

edit: I saw gitlab on the list and realized it is probably the closest self-hosted equivalent to the github option I mentioned previously

https://about.gitlab.com/features/continuous-integration/