Summary: CI/CD with GitHub Actions

Introduction to CI/CD

We started our journey by understanding the importance of Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) in modern software development. We learned how CI/CD accelerates the development cycle, reduces bugs, and allows faster delivery of features. We also understood the stages of a typical CI/CD pipeline—code, build, test, and deploy.

GitHub Actions basics

Next, we delved into the world of GitHub Actions, a powerful tool for automating CI/CD pipelines right within our GitHub repositories. We learned about the structure of a GitHub Actions workflow file, and how these workflows can be triggered by various events in our repository.

We discovered how GitHub Actions let us define jobs, which are made up of steps that run commands or use actions from the GitHub Marketplace. We also noted the importance of the GitHub Marketplace, a vast resource of prebuilt actions that can simplify and accelerate the creation of our workflows.

Setting up a CI workflow

Armed with our newfound knowledge, we set up our first Continuous Integration workflow for a serverless project. This workflow was designed to run our tests every time we push changes to our repository. It involved setting up Node.js, installing our project’s dependencies, and running our tests using npm.

Deploying with GitHub Actions

Once we were confident in our CI setup, we extended our GitHub Actions workflow to include Continuous Deployment. We learned how to set up an additional job that runs after our tests pass, which deploys our serverless application using the sls deploy command.

We learned how to securely provide our AWS credentials to our workflow using GitHub Secrets, allowing the Serverless Framework to deploy our application to AWS without exposing our sensitive information.

Conclusion

By now, we’ve gained a solid understanding of CI/CD principles, how to use GitHub Actions for CI/CD, and how to apply these in the context of a Serverless project. We’ve learned how to automate our tests and deployments, allowing us to deliver high-quality, reliable software at a faster pace.

Remember, this is just the beginning. The world of CI/CD and GitHub Actions is vast, and there’s always more to learn and explore. Keep experimenting, keep learning, and continue to improve our software development processes.