Building a CI pipeline with GitHub Actions – Continuous Integration with GitHub Actions and Jenkins-1
GitHub Actions is a SaaS-based tool that comes with GitHub. So, when you create your GitHub repository, you get access to this service out of the box. Therefore, GitHub Actions is one of the best tools for people new to CI/CD and who want to get started quickly. GitHub Actions helps you automate tasks, build, test, and deploy your code, and even streamline your workflow, making your life as a developer much easier.
Here’s what GitHub Actions can do for you:
- CI: GitHub Actions can automatically build and test your code whenever you push changes to your repository. This ensures that your code remains error-free and ready for deployment.
- CD: You can use GitHub Actions to deploy your application to various hosting platforms, such as AWS, Azure, and GCP. This allows you to deliver updates to your users quickly and efficiently.
- Workflow automation: You can create custom workflows using GitHub Actions to automate repetitive tasks in your development process. For example, you can automatically label and assign issues, trigger builds on specific events, or send notifications to your team.
- Custom scripts: GitHub Actions allows you to run custom scripts and commands, giving you full control over your automation tasks. Whether you need to compile code, run tests, or execute deployment scripts, GitHub Actions can handle it.
- Community actions: GitHub Actions has a marketplace where you can find pre-built actions created by the community. These actions cover a wide range of tasks, from publishing to npm to deploying to popular cloud providers. You can easily incorporate these actions into your workflow.
- Scheduled jobs: You can schedule actions to run at specific times or intervals. This is handy for tasks such as generating reports, sending reminders, or performing maintenance during non-peak hours.
- Multi-platform support: GitHub Actions supports various programming languages, operating systems, and cloud environments, which means you can build and deploy applications for different platforms with ease.
- Integration: GitHub Actions seamlessly integrates with your GitHub repositories, making it a natural extension of your development environment. You can define workflows by using YAML files directly in your repository.
GitHub Actions revolutionizes the way developers work by automating routine tasks, ensuring code quality, and streamlining the SDLC. It’s a valuable tool for teams and individual developers looking to enhance productivity and maintain high-quality code.
Now, let’s create a CI pipeline for our sample Blog App. Blog App consists of multiple microservices, and each microservice runs on an individual Docker container. We also have unit tests written for each microservice, which we can run to verify the code changes. If the tests pass, the build will pass; otherwise, it will fail.
To access the resources for this section, cd into the following directory:
$ cd ~/modern-devops/blog-app