Blog-Technical-Content VS starter-workflows

We will set up a GitHub repository with a simple Terraform file that deploys an EC2 instance on AWS. You can find the demo contents here.

Next, we will go through an example of creating a custom module that takes as input a string that represents an epoch timestamp and converts it to its human-readable equivalent of type datetime in Python. You can find the code for this tutorial on this repository.

This is an example play to try out our new webserver role. Let’s go ahead and execute this play. To follow along, you should first run the vagrant up command from the top directory of this repository to create our target remote host.

Let’s examine how we can use all this in a real-world example. In this GitHub repository, we define the Terraform configuration for this example’s infrastructure. To follow along, you will need to install Terraform, have an AWS account ready, and authenticate with your AWS keys via the command line. Note that you might be charged a few dollars in your AWS account if you follow along.

If you are still learning how to use Ansible, you might also find helpful the introductory Ansible Tutorial or Working with Ansible Playbooks blog posts. You can find this article’s code on this repository if you wish to follow along.

Our primary entry point is main.tf, and in simple use cases, we can add all our resources there. We define our variables in variables.tf and assign values to them in terraform.tfvars. We use the file outputs.tf to declare output values. You can find a similar example project structure here.

GitHub, as one of the leading web-based Git repository hosting service, provides a powerful suite of CI/CD tools in the form of GitHub Actions. These are directly integrated into the platform which empowers developers to increase the speed, efficiency and reliability of delivering products. In this brief article, we will take a look at what CI/CD is, why we should use it, as well as some of its applications in my projects.

GitHub Actions is a modern CI/CD tool integrated natively on GitHub. Itenables the rapid automation of build, test, deployment, and other custom workflows on GitHub with no need for external tools.

GitHub Actions is GitHub's CI/CD solution. You can use it to run automated tasks each time you change your code. Although the platform lacks a built-in Kubernetes integration, third-party plugins such as Azure's Deploy to Kubernetes Cluster action can automate deployments and manage different rollout strategies.

GitHub Actions is a feature-rich CI/CD platform embedded within GitHub, enabling developers to automate, customize, and execute software development workflows directly in their repositories. An Action inside GitHub Actions is a discrete unit of automation that performs a specific task within a workflow. All the Actions are reusable, and there are many to choose from. You can even create your own reusable ones.

actions/starter-workflows

The real power of using PHP code-quality tools is when it’s added to your continuous integration process, which means it automatically checks the code every time someone makes a push or pull request to your project repo. In this section, we'll be looking at how to do just that. GitHub actions is available for free so we'll use it for demo purposes. Note that there are some limits to private repos, so set your test repo to public if you can.

You can even automate the running of this script — hence the directory name automation — to happen every time the data changes, using GitHub Actions.

# Based on https://github.com/actions/starter-workflows/blob/main/ci/node.js.yml name: CI on: pull_request: branches: - main jobs: ci: runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: - uses: actions/checkout@v2 - uses: actions/setup-node@v2 with: node-version: lts/* cache: 'npm' - run: npm ci - run: npm run build --if-present - run: npm test

You might remember that I’ve been taking an interest in GitHub Actions for the last year or so (I even wrote a book on the subject). And at the Perl Conference in Toronto last summer I gave a talk called “GitHub Actions for Perl Development” (here are the slides and the video).