Understanding CI/CD with GitHub Actions

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) are practices that help automate the software development and release process.

Core Concepts

• CI (Continuous Integration): Automatically building and testing code changes every time a developer pushes to the repository.
• CD (Continuous Deployment): Automatically deploying the code to a production environment after it passes the CI stage.

Example GitHub Actions Workflow

Create a file at .github/workflows/main.yml:

name: CI/CD Pipeline

on:
  push:
    branches: [ main ]

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3

    - name: Use Node.js
      uses: actions/setup-node@v3
      with:
        node-version: '18.x'

    - name: Install dependencies
      run: npm install

    - name: Build
      run: npm run build

    - name: Run tests
      run: npm test

This workflow will automatically run on every push to the main branch, installing dependencies, building the project, and running tests.