So far we were able to set up a deployment and reporting servers, making a full way from pushing a new commit to updating the app in production. But what can we automate before pushing to master? What if we run a set of checks to make sure our app is behaving correctly before deploying it? That's where GitHub Actions will come handy.
GitHub Actions is a feature that allows you to run custom checks and, well, actions each time your remote git repository changes. Two major ways to use it is to run automated checks on our codebase or use it for continuous deployment. As we do all our CD work on our own server, we're most interested in the former. That is, we will leverage GitHub Actions to run tests and other checks to make sure our codebase is OK.
There are several ways to manage your git workflow. I won't dive too much into it, but it boils down to whether you want to have feature branches, do you differentiate between
develop
and master
, and whether you deploy your code automatically for each push. I researched this for a while, and here's what made the most sense to me. For context, I'm talking about an individual or a small team working on a small- to mid-size project.Here's my workflow of choice:
develop
and master
develop
master
, code is deployedWe don't need to configure anything to get started. Create a file under
.github/workflows
named nodejs.yml
and commit it, and GitHub will automatically process it and show nodejs
workflow under the Actions
tab.Our pipeline will consist of three jobs:
build
, notify
, and create PR
.Our build step will consist of 5 commands, running one after another.
npm audit
: runs a security audit of dependenciesnpm ci
: makes a clean install of dependenciesnpm run lint
: lints your codebase (e.g. ESLint)npm run build
: builds your app (e.g. Webpack)npm test
: runs tests (e.g. Jest)Of course, all the steps are optional. You can add your own checks as well.
Here's the full code of the build job:
build:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
strategy:
matrix:
node-version: [8.x, 10.x, 12.x]
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v1
- name: Use Node.js ${{ matrix.node-version }}
uses: actions/setup-node@v1
with:
node-version: ${{ matrix.node-version }}
- name: npm install, build, and test
run: |
npm audit
npm ci
npm run lint
npm run build
npm test
strategy.matrix
allows us to test our app on multiple Node.js versions in parallel, which is handy.Let's now send a webhook to our reporting server upon successful build. Note passing
WEBHOOK_URL
from repository secrets.notify:
needs: build
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Webhook
uses: joelwmale/[email protected]
env:
WEBHOOK_URL: ${{ secrets.WEBHOOK_URL }}
data: "{'app': 'my app', 'success': true}"
Once GitHub executes build, it will trigger a webhook to the specified URL so we can catch it and show some message.
Additionally, you can sign your webhook requests with JWT or HMAC (for example, using this action).
Finally, let's send PR to master after a successful build. Secrets with
GITHUB_
prefix are provided by GitHub itself, so we don't need to do anything extra here.master-pr:
needs: build
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v1
- name: Create Pull Request
uses: repo-sync/[email protected]
with:
github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
The neat thing about this workflow is that you get an overview of all jobs for each PR.
We made it! We managed to build an entire workflow of deploying an app.
Here's what we achieved.
Each time a new code is pushed:
Each time PR is merged to
master
:In other words, all of the boring stuff is done automatically with minimal input from our, developer's, side.
I hope you enjoyed the series! From there, you can continue adding automation to your build and deploy pipelines based on your app requirements.