Introduction
Over the past decade, continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) have become staples of the software development lifecycle. CI automates the process of merging code and checking for basic regressions and code quality issues, relieving some of the code review burdens on your dev team. CD and automated deployments eliminate the overhead involved each time a new feature or a hotfix needs to get deployed.
Imagine if there were no more nights and weekends spent packaging builds and manually deploying across servers! A functional CI/CD setup makes it significantly easier to have a truly agile workflow, as you can deploy as frequently as you want to.
However, CD, in particular, can be difficult to set up, oftentimes involving learning a whole new set of skills involving Dockerfiles, YAML, and the idiosyncrasies of each app and environment. Especially for smaller teams, these complexities make the idea of having automated deployments just a dream.
Continuous deployment doesn’t need to be this hard to set up.
As a full-stack developer and consultant who often helps dev teams to increase the value they deliver each sprint, when Heroku Flow came onto my radar I knew it was time to take a closer look. Could this be the simple, straightforward solution I’d been looking for?
What Is Heroku Flow?
Heroku Flow is the umbrella for a few different Heroku products which work together to provide a full CI/CD suite of tools. For CI, there’s Heroku CI. For CD, there is Heroku Pipelines, which allows you to specify a group of environments within which to promote builds, and Heroku Review Apps, which give you on-demand builds of each pull request. Bringing it all together is the GitHub Integration, which allows the process to be automatically triggered simply by pushing to your default branch.
Let’s set up a sample application and see what it takes. Do note that Heroku Review Apps is currently only available with the GitHub Integration.
#devops #heroku #ci/cd #continuous deployment #ci/cd pipeline #web programming
