Streamlining Development with CI/CD Pipelines
The Fundamentals of CI/CD
Before we dive into the nitty-gritty, let’s cover the basics. CI/CD consists of three crucial components:
- Continuous Integration: Automating the testing of new features to ensure they work seamlessly.
- Continuous Delivery: Ensuring new changes are thoroughly tested, bug-free, and ready for deployment to production.
- Continuous Deployment: Deploying changes to production by merging to a specific branch, such as main.
CI/CD Strategy for Our Example Application
Our example application will utilize a single GitHub repository with two branches: main and develop. We’ll create a new feature branch from develop, push changes to its own feature branch, and then create a pull request against the develop branch on GitHub. We’ll also have two CI/CD YAML files for configuration: development and production.
Setting Up the CI/CD Pipeline
To set up our CI/CD pipeline, we’ll need to:
- Create a new React project using the command
npx create-react-app my-app - Set up two Heroku environments: one for development and one for production.
- Configure GitHub Actions with Heroku as our cloud hosting service and GitHub to host our repository.
Testing and Deployment
To test our workflow, we’ll:
- Merge a pull request to the develop branch, triggering the development pipeline.
- Once the pipeline is complete, we’ll see our changes deployed to the Heroku development environment.
- To trigger the production pipeline, we’ll merge the develop branch into main and push those changes to the remote main branch.
Alternate Deployment via Dockerfile
We can also deploy using a Docker container. To do so, we’ll add a new CMD command to the end of our Dockerfile:
CMD ["npm", "start"]and update our GitHub workflow files to use Docker.
The Power of CI/CD
By automating integration and delivery, we can significantly improve the speed and accuracy of our deployments. With CI/CD, we can focus on writing code, not worrying about manual deployment processes.