CI Pipelines Using GitHub Actions

Introduction to continuous integration

Continuous integration (CI) is a software development practice that involves regularly integrating code changes from multiple developers into a shared repository. The main objective of CI is to detect integration issues as early as possible by automating the process of building, testing, and validating the codebase.

The purpose of CI is to foster collaboration, ensure code quality, and streamline the development workflow. Instead of waiting for a large chunk of code to be completed before integration, CI encourages developers to integrate their changes frequently, usually multiple times a day. Each integration triggers an automated build and testing process, allowing for rapid feedback and identification of any issues that may arise.

Introduction to GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is a powerful workflow automation and CI/CD platform provided by GitHub. It allows developers to define custom workflows that automate various tasks and processes directly within their GitHub repositories. GitHub Actions provides a flexible and integrated environment for building, testing, and deploying software projects.

With GitHub Actions, developers can create workflows using YAML-based configuration files. These workflows consist of a series of steps and actions that define the tasks to be executed. Workflows can be triggered based on events such as pushes, pull requests, or scheduled intervals, enabling automated processes at different stages of the software development lifecycle.

GitHub Actions is seamlessly integrated with GitHub repositories, making it easy to enable and configure workflows for our projects. When we create a workflow file in the .github/workflows directory of our repository, GitHub automatically recognizes it and starts monitoring events to trigger the associated workflows.

To set up a GitHub Actions workflow for ...