The Importance and Secrets of CI/CD

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Introduction

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As time and information rapidly evolve, many new technologies emerge that automate the human factor. Many developers think that CI/CD is just a toolset for DevOps engineers, but the pace of development forces developers to learn and apply new technologies. To enhance your professional level, I recommend learning this technology as well. It will help you stay competitive in the market.

About CI/CD

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Modern software development requires fast development and high-quality assurance. To achieve this, the Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) methodology is used.

CI/CD automates the processes of code integration, testing, and deployment, which reduces the number of manual actions, accelerates the release of new features, and improves software reliability.

• Continuous Integration (CI) – ensures that every change in the software code is checked and merged with the main codebase, reducing the likelihood of integration issues.
• Continuous Deployment (CD) – automates the process of checking and deploying code to the production environment, ensuring fast and safe releases of new changes.

Implementing CI/CD is important for both small and large software projects, as it improves the efficiency of the development process and reduces the likelihood of errors in the production environment.

🚀 How to Start and Implement CI/CD

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Implementing CI/CD requires a phased approach, including tool selection, environment setup, planning, and automation.

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1. Choose CI/CD Tools

Depending on the technology stack, various CI/CD tools can be selected, such as:

• GitHub Actions – suitable for integration with GitHub.
• GitLab CI/CD – integrated into the GitLab platform and allows automating all development stages.
• Jenkins – a powerful and flexible tool that works in any environment.
• CircleCI, Travis CI, Bitbucket Pipelines – other popular cloud CI/CD solutions.

2. Set Up Continuous Integration (CI)

The main goal of CI is to automatically check and test every change in the code.

✅ Steps

• Create a Git repository, for example, on GitHub or GitLab.
• Create a CI plan, including the following steps:
  • Installing dependencies
  • Linting and static analysis of the code
  • Automatically running tests
• Create a CI configuration file (e.g., .github/workflows/ci.yml, .gitlab-ci.yml, or Jenkinsfile).
• CircleCI, Travis CI, Bitbucket Pipelines – other popular solutions that offer cloud CI/CD.
• Test and fix any potential errors.

3. Set Up Continuous Deployment (CD)

CD ensures that code passing tests is automatically deployed to the server or cloud environment.

✅ Steps

• Select a deployment environment:
  • VPS (e.g., DigitalOcean, AWS EC2, Linode)
  • Containers (Docker, Kubernetes)
  • Cloud solutions (Vercel, Netlify, Firebase Hosting, AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Create the deployment process:
  • Create a build
  • Package or containerize
  • Deploy in production or staging environments
• Test the deployed application.

At the end of the article, I will share my git repository, where you can find several examples.

Additionally, I will explain the YAML format and its usage guidelines.

What is YAML?

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YAML (Yet Another Markup Language or YAML Ain't Markup Language) is a readable and lightweight data serialization language widely used for configuration files. YAML is particularly suitable for CI/CD planning (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins), Docker Compose, Kubernetes, Ansible, and other DevOps tools.

Basic YAML Rules

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✅ Simple and hierarchical structure

YAML uses unique indentation to define hierarchy (instead of braces or markup tags like in JSON or XML).

 app:
   name: "My Application"
   version: 1.0
   environment: "production"

   

🔹 Indentation is required, use 2 or 4 spaces (not tabs).

✅ Key-Value Pairs

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server: "localhost"
port: 8080
debug: true

🔹 Text values can be quoted as "string" or without quotes.

✅ Lists (Arrays)

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In YAML, lists (arrays) are represented with the "-" symbol.

freamworks:

  - React

  - Vue

  - Angula

🔹 They can also be in key-value format.

 database:
   mysql:
      version: "8.0"
      port: 3306
   psotgresql:
      version: "15"
      port: 5432

✅ Multiline Texts

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If you need to write multiline values, use the | (literal block) or > (folded block) symbol.

 message: |
    This is a multi-line

    text that is preserved 

    in the same form.

 message: >
    This is multi-line text,     
    but each new line is
     converted to a space.

✅ Numbers and Boolean Values

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If you need to write multiline values, use the | (literal block) or > (folded block) symbol.

🔹 Boolean values can be true/false, on/off, yes/no.

🔹 Numbers can be integers (integer) or floating-point (float).

Reusing Data in YAML (Anchors & Aliases)

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YAML allows data reuse using &anchor and *alias symbols.

 default_config: &config
   retries: 3
   timeout: 10
   log_level: "debug"

 service_1:
     <<: &config
     name: "API Service"  
 service_1:
    <<: &config        
    name: "Worker Service"

🔹 ❬❬ *config means that service_1 and service_2 inherit the default_config values.

YAML Error Prevention Tips

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⚠Typical errors:

❌ Using tabs

✅ Use 2 or 4 spaces instead of tabs.

You can find more detailed information in my git repository.