Continuous Integration

Three Main Categories

Open Source (Jenkins)
- you host it
- configure it
- maintain it
Commercial
- may be hosted on-premise
- typically expesive
- come with alot of support
CI as a Service (CircleCI, GitHub Actions)
- may be hosted in the cloud
- pay as you go model may help with costs
- more support than with open source

Best Practices

Start with a clean environment
- VM
- container
- virtual env
Build to pass the "coffee test"
- The coffee test is the idea that the amount of time it takes from code commit to receive results should be at most as long as it takes a person to get a cup of coffee (this is probably no more than 5 minutes assuming you make a fresh pot)

CI Culture

Run tests locally before committing
Don't commit code to broken builds unless it fixes the build
Don't leave the build broken
Don't remove failing tests

**Notifications Notifications help mantain transparancy and communication for the development process. For example, sending automatic notifications to a teams channel when a commit fails a test or getting a notification when committed code hasn't been deployed for over an hour.

Example

GitHub actions let you build custom CI solutions using a yaml file stored in your repository. There are many benefits to using GitHub actions including low costs, a large marketplace with pre-built solutions, and minimal development time.

Since GitHub actions are part of your repository, you can seamlessly add them to part of your development process.

The Yaml file

The yaml file is a markdown file that contains the instructions for your action.

The basic structure of a workflow is:

trigger: when should the workflow run
jobs: what you want the workflow to do
- runs on: the type of machine you want to jobs to run on
- steps: the actual actions the workflow will take

The go.yaml file in the .github\workflows directory shows a simple example that builds all binaries and runs any tests in the repository.

Building Your Own Actions

While there are many actions already available in the GitHub marketplace, you can build your own custom actions using Javascript/Typescript or using docker and any language you chose.

References: Custom GitHub Actions

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