Going Live Chapter 10Benefits of CI
Now that we are aware of what CI is and why we should use it, let's look into some of the
benefits it gives:
Build and test applications automatically: While it is expected that a developer
builds the application and runs the tests before pushing the changed code into
the repository, sometimes the developer might just forget. In such cases,
integrating a Continuous Integration process helps make the process automatic.
Gives the confidence to deploy: Since CI checks the test suites and we can
configure it to check the quality of the code in our codebase, we don't need to
worry about forgetting to run the tests before pushing the code to GitHub.
Easy configuration: CI is very easy to configure. We only need to create a single
file with all the configurations.
Error reporting: This is one of the powerful features of CI. When something
breaks while building or running the tests, the team gets a notification. It can also
provide information about who made what changes, which is awesome.Introduction to Travis CI
Now that we know about CI, we need to start using it in our application as well. There are
several technologies that can be used to follow the CI process for any application. There are
a lot of tools and each has their own benefits of use; the one that we are going to choose for
our application is Travis CI.
Travis CI is a technology used to build a CI server. Travis CI is used heavily with GitHub.
There are a few other tools as well. Some of them are:
Circle CI
Jenkins
Semaphore CI
DroneIf you want to learn more about each of the options, here is a good read for that:
https://blog.github.com/2017-11-07-github-welcomes-all-ci-tools/.
Travis CI is used to build for every push that is made to GitHub and it is very easy to set
up.