What is CI/CD?
CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) is a set of practices that automate the process of integrating code changes, running tests, building applications, and deploying them to production. It enables teams to deliver updates frequently and reliably with minimal manual intervention.
How Does CI/CD Work?
Continuous Integration (CI) automatically builds and tests code every time a developer pushes changes to the repository. This catches bugs early and ensures that code from different developers integrates smoothly. Continuous Deployment (CD) extends this by automatically deploying passing builds to production, while Continuous Delivery deploys to a staging environment and requires manual approval for production.
CI/CD pipelines are configured through tools like GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, and CircleCI. A typical pipeline might run linting, execute unit and integration tests, build the application, and deploy it to hosting. For static websites, the CI/CD pipeline often runs the static site generator to produce HTML files and then deploys them to a hosting platform. CI/CD eliminates the error-prone manual deployment process and enables rapid, confident releases.