About those GitHub Actions 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 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. before 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 and , 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. develop master Here's my workflow of choice: there are two branches: and develop master code is pushed to develop each push triggers code checks, powered by GH Actions assuming checks passed, new PR is created automatically once PR is pushed to , code is deployed master you get a notification on the check result Setting Actions up We don't need to configure anything to get started. Create a file under named and commit it, and GitHub will automatically process it and show workflow under the tab. .github/workflows nodejs.yml nodejs Actions Our pipeline will consist of three jobs: , , and . build notify create PR Build Our build step will consist of 5 commands, running one after another. : runs a security audit of dependencies npm audit : makes a clean install of dependencies npm ci : lints your codebase (e.g. ESLint) npm run lint : builds your app (e.g. Webpack) npm run build : runs tests (e.g. Jest) npm test 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 allows us to test our app on multiple Node.js versions in parallel, which is handy. strategy.matrix Notify Let's now send a webhook to our reporting server upon successful build. Note passing from repository secrets. WEBHOOK_URL notify: needs: build runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: - name: Webhook uses: joelwmale/webhook-action@1.0.0 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 ## Create a PR Finally, let's send PR to master after a successful build. Secrets with prefix are provided by GitHub itself, so we don't need to do anything extra here. GITHUB_ master-pr: needs: build runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: - uses: actions/checkout@v1 - name: Create Pull Request uses: repo-sync/pull-request@v2.0.1 with: github_token: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }} The neat thing about this workflow is that you get an overview of all jobs for each PR. Wrapping up 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: The codebase is audited to make sure there are no security vulnerabilities Build tool ensuring there are no build-time errors Linter is run to make sure code formatted correctly Tests are run to make sure app behaves correctly PR is created We receive a notification Each time PR is merged to : master CD server updates the app CD server notifies reporting server We receive a notification 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.
