16 CI/CD in the cloud with Docker and GitHub Actions
The continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline is the heart of modern software projects. Developers push changes to source code and trigger a pipeline run that builds, tests, packages, and deploys the entire application. Automatic deployment to production might be a bit much for some organizations, but you can continuously deploy to a pre-production environment and be confident that you always have your latest features ready to go. The pipeline is crucial to the project’s success, so it needs to run quickly and be repeatable and portable. That gives the development team fast feedback and lets you easily debug issues with the pipeline, so you can move between CI/CD services with the minimum amount of rework. Docker is a great fit for powering your pipeline—you can compile code and run unit tests in multi-stage builds; spin up a local deployment of the app using Docker Compose to test it; and publish tested images to a release repository for production deployment.