Learn how CD can save you hundreds of hours

Deployment is always a complicated and tedious task. As your applications grow, you will probably need to ship to production many times a week, and doing so rapidly is usually crucial. Luckily for you, thanks to Continuous Delivery and GitHub Actions, deploying to production becomes a trivial task!

What is CD?

Continuous Delivery or CD is the agile practice of continuously deploying to production bit size pieces of code, instead of in big chunks. This way, not only your application can grow more steadily, but it also becomes way easier to identify bugs in small commits than in massive pieces of code. CD is at its best when combined with Continuous Integration or CI.

CI parts from the same principle of managing your application changes in small, more manageable parts, but contrary to CD, CI is responsible for verifying that new changes to the code base work as intended. This way, CD will only step in to deploy new changes if they work as intended!

The beauty of CI and CD is that they can be fully automatized thanks to GitHub Actions! Every time a commit is made to the main branch, we can trigger a workflow that runs tests on our code and if they pass, our code gets deployed to production. All you will have to worry about is pushing your code to your repository and fixing any bugs that may occur.

To learn more about GitHub Actions and how to create workflows, check out my previous article on CI.

In this article, I will be mainly focused on the contents of a proper CD workflow.

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