Most of us agree that C_ontinuous Integration (CI)_ , C_ontinuous Delivery (CD)_, cloud infrastructure, test automation, and configuration management make up the basics of devops. Depending on the scale of your project, CI/CD may be a hassle to set up and difficult to implement. Nevertheless, it is definitely necessary and here’s why: In an Agile environment, requirements evolve quickly over time and to ship out features which are bug-free, having a suite of automated tests and integrating code continuously is of utmost important. Having a proper CI/CD environment provides you the to experiment, implement new features, and push out updates quickly. confidence In fact, with proper CI, bugs can be caught earlier and developers can review code faster as changes to code in a repository are usually merged a few times a day so it can be continuously validated. You sure you want to do without CI/CD? By following this article, you will be equipped with the basic knowledge to be able to on and deploy your project to in less than an hour. Of course, we will not be going in-depth on how to write unit tests and that can be further explored in another article. set up a CI/CD environment Gitlab NodeJS Heroku Step 1: Setup a Gitlab account Sign up for an account and create a new project. Name your project and choose whether it is private/public. When you first create your project, you will need to add your ssh keys to it. Step 2: Add SSH keys To create a pair of SSH keys, follow the steps below: ssh-keygen -t rsa Then enter the file to save your SSH keys in. Enter file in which to save the key (/home/demo/.ssh/id_rsa): Lastly, you can choose to have a passphrase or not. Once done, copy the public key and paste it in gitlab. cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa_gitlab.pub | pbcopy After clicking “Add key”, store the key in your keychain with the command: ssh-add  ~/.ssh/id_rsa_gitlab Configure SSH to always use the keychain. If you do not already have a file in . , create an file. In other words, in the directory in your home dir, make a file called . config ssh ~/.ssh/config .ssh config In that file, add the following lines: .ssh/config Host sources: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/48502/how-can-i-permanently-add-my-ssh-private-key-to-keychain-so-it-is-automatically Step 3: Setup staging and production environments In Heroku, create a pipeline which will hold both staging and production apps. Inside the pipeline, create both the staging and productions apps. Note, it will be good if the name of the staging app can be appended with the word ‘staging’ at the back to clearly differentiate the two apps. After setting up the apps, it will look something like this. Step 4: Setup your tests In the root directory of the app, create a folder called , and add a test file in the folder. For me, I use both (assertion library) and (JS framework). You can use other assertion libraries such as Jasmine etc if you prefer. tests chai mocha npm install mocha chai --save-dev Add a script to package.json so you can simply run next time. npm test "test": ./node_modules/.bin/_mocha --recursive ./tests/*.test.js Add a file in called tests me.test.js describe(‘me’, () => {it(‘is awesome’, () => {expect(...).to.be.... })}); As I mentioned earlier, we will not be going in-depth into how to write the tests. Step 5: Setting up your CI environment (like finally!) To setup a CI environment on Gitlab, add a in the root of your repository. .gitlab-ci.yml This file contains definitions of how your project should be built and your Gitlab Runner (which you will be setting up later) will search for this file in your repository and execute it within the environment of the Runner. This is how I setup my . You may wish to tweak it depending on your project. But of course, before you push up your project to Gitlab, it is good practice to run it by the first to make sure it’s valid, if not, it will result in errors. I will explain the various components in my YAML file. .gitlab-ci.yml YAML validator image: node:6.10.3 stages: ver init tests deploy ver: stage: ver script: - node --version

- whoami init: stage: init script: - npm cache clean

- rm -rf node-modules

- npm install run_tests: stage: tests script: - npm test deploy_staging: stage: deploy script: - git remote add heroku https://heroku:$HEROKU\_API\_KEY@git.heroku.com/text-giving-staging.git

- git push heroku master

- echo "Deployed to staging server" environment: name: staging url: https://text-giving-staging.herokuapp.com/ only: - master deploy_production: stage: deploy script: - git remote add heroku https://heroku:$HEROKU\_API\_KEY@git.heroku.com/text-giving.git

- git push heroku master

- echo "Deployed to production server" environment: name: production url: https://text-giving.herokuapp.com/ when: manual only: - master : allows you to specify a certain version of NodeJS you want to use during build time image : define build stages. In this case, we have , , , and , but you can change the names of the stages to what you deem fit for your project. stages ver init tests deploy allows us to check the version of NodeJS we are using and reveals whether the user has permissions, which makes it easier to debug when things go wrong. stage ver: node —-version whoami we clean the npm cache, remove the node modules, install it and then we run the tests which we have written previously. stage init: we want to run the tests to make sure all the tests pass. stage tests: : we will add a remote to the repository using Heroku API key. We can retrieve the Heroku API key from page in Heroku. stage deploy Accounts setting Then, go to Gitlab settings > CI/CD pipelines > Secret variables and add HEROKU_API_KEY as a Secret Variable. We can then refer to the Heroku API key as in our YAML file. $HEROKU_API_KEY Notice we have two deploy stages — one for , one for . We have also set it to manually push to production by adding in the YAML file. Hence, if all is successful, it will push the branch automatically to , and we will need to push manually to if everything passes. staging production when: manual master staging production Step 6: Install a Gitlab Runner As mentioned, in GitLab, Runners run the jobs that you define in . Since I’m using a MacOS, I will be following the instructions here: . It should be fairly straightforward to follow. .gitlab-ci.yml https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/install/osx.html Step 7: Register the Gitlab Runner Next, register the Gitlab Runner by following instructions here: . Again, it should be fairly straightforward to follow. For the runner executor, I chose to run it on which is the easiest to configure (you may choose other options if you prefer). After registering, install and start the service with the following commands: https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/register/index.html shell gitlab-runner installgitlab-runner start You may check if the runner is running with the following command: gitlab-runner statusgitlab-runner: Service is running! Now that wasn’t so bad was it? In of this article (please stay tuned), I will be showing you how to setup a notifier for your CI/CD pipeline on Telegram and then pushing the repository up to Gitlab and watch the CI/CD pipeline run through the different stages you have configured and eventually manually pushing it to production. Part 2 If you have any feedback for me, please feel free to contact me at or just leave a comment on this article. hello@imstacy.com Or if this article has helped you in anyway, please show some love and hit the little 💚 and follow me on for updates on what I’m up to next! https://github.com/stacygohyunsi

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