CI/CD Introduction
Learn about Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment - essential practices for modern software development.
What is CI/CD?
Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of automatically building and testing code changes as they are committed to version control.
Continuous Deployment (CD) extends CI by automatically deploying tested code changes to production or staging environments.
Benefits
- Early Bug Detection - Issues are caught quickly
- Faster Delivery - Automated processes reduce manual work
- Consistent Deployments - Standardized deployment process
- Reduced Risk - Smaller, frequent changes are easier to debug
- Code changes trigger the pipeline
- Usually integrated with Git repositories
- Compile code and dependencies
- Create deployable artifacts
- Run automated tests (unit, integration, e2e)
- Code quality checks and linting
- Deploy to staging/production environments
- Run post-deployment tests
- GitHub Actions - Integrated with GitHub repositories
- GitLab CI - Built into GitLab platform
- Jenkins - Open-source automation server
- CircleCI - Cloud-based CI/CD platform
CI/CD Pipeline Stages
1. Source Control
2. Build
3. Test
4. Deploy
Popular CI/CD Tools
Example GitHub Actions Workflow
yaml
name: CI/CD Pipeline
on:
push:
branches: [main]
pull_request:
branches: [main]
jobs:
test:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v3
- uses: actions/setup-node@v3
with:
node-version: '18'
- run: npm install
- run: npm test
- run: npm run build