Learn about Continuous Integration

[smiths]

No description provided.

[EmilSoleymani]

Relevant Videos Used For Research

• What is Continuous Integration?
• DevOps CI/CD Explained in 100 Seconds

Infrequent Integration

Imagine a scenario where multiple developers are working on adding their own features to some existing code. Each developer could make their own changes to different files, many of which could be conflicting. For example, one developer modifies line 47, while the other completely deletes it. When attempting to merge these developers work, there will be a merge conflict. This scenario could occur with code spanning many files, and with code dating back months or even years. This situation is known as merge hell and it must be avoided.

Solution: Continuous Integration

Continuous Integration

With continuous integration, each developer frequently commits their changes, and before working on anything new makes sure they are working with the most recent version of the project. This way, when developer 1 deletes line 47, develop 2 knows that it is not there and acts accordingly. Thus, we can say continuous integration helps avoid merge hell. However, this could lead to many bugs and errors, thus continuous testing is also needed. With continuous testing there are automated unit tests with each commit, and the whole team is alerted if any issue should arise. Git Actions can help with automated testing:

name: Automated testing example
on:
   push:
      branches:
          -master

jobs:
    DO STUFF

Automates tasks specified under jobs every time a push is made to master branch

[smiths]

Great!