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Automation in development and deployment of application using CI/CD?

CI/CD has grown to become a software development practice which brings down the efforts and the app development cost. It helps us to make the app development process more efficient. It is the fundamental practice for DevOps implementation and bridges the gap between the development and operations team. CI/CD is the backbone of the modern development environment.

Simply CI/CD brings automation to the development process to integrate the code and deliver the product with the team, users, or client.

What is CI/CD?

A CI/CD pipeline can be easily understood as the process pathway through which we can deliver a single unit of production-ready software. Your team will choose which services they’ll use to build this; there’s no single canonical implementation of a CI/CD pipeline.

We heard CI/CD much time’s so we need to understand if CI/CD is two different concepts or is a single concept.

So CI and CD both are different concepts. Which actually work collaboratively to

CI — Continuous Integration
CD — Continuous Delivery

Continuous Integration

Basically, integration means mixing things together to create one product or to achieve the result.
As I said integration means mixing things together but how this will be in the programming world?
So in the IT world for the development process, we know that we use to store all our code in GitLab. Where we commit code on daily basis. Or there are multiple developers who work on different modules and we need to merge their code. Continuous Integration is the process of merging or committing code.

Continuous Integration is a habit, not a tool where it’s shared agreement in a team that:

1. When we get the latest code from the repository, it will always build successfully and pass all tests.
2. We will check in our code every day.
3. Integration happens when we merge code to branch or git push.
4. Then dedicated servers automate the build process and notify the development team of build status.

Here in continuous integration we write the code, push code to the repository if there is any error to generate the build we solve that problem.

Continuous Delivery

Continuous Delivery is the ability to get changes of all types — including new features, configuration changes, bug fixes, and experiments — into production, or into the hands of users, safely and quickly in a sustainable way.

Continuous delivery starts where Continuous Integration ends. To deliver build in everyone’s hands we need to use continuous delivery. It’s the way of delivering build continuously.

So basically CI/CD is the process of developing and delivering the projects to the team, user, and the client.

To Integrate CI/CD in your project following are the requirement

1. CI/CD Tools
2. Fastlane
3. GitLab Account
4. Environment specific setup

There are many tools available in the market to start working with CI/CD.
Following are a few of them:

• Jenkins: a free, open-source, java-based tool that gives a lot of flexibility.
• Azure Pipelines: it's a Microsoft product free for up to five users & open source projects
• Travis CI: a tool that’s popular for GitHub projects and has a hosted and self-hosted solution. You can start for free.
• CircleCI: a popular tool for GitHub open-source projects that offers a hosted or self-hosted solution

What is Fastlane?

It’s a scripting language and open-source platform which helps to automate
every aspect of your development and release workflow. By considering ios development and distribution developers have to go through the process of

• Increment apps build number and version number
• Push a new version back to git
• Codesign with the valid provisioning profile
• Generate IPA and then
• Deploy it to test flight

For that Fastlane provides lanes that help to automates the above steps.

Environment specific setup

In the development process, we always follow some rules in that we have a test server where we actually test our application before hand over to the client. Using multiple environments we ensure that your software is rigorously tested before it is deployed and made available to users.

There are many advantages for multiple environments such as

• Keeps software bug-free as possible
• Keeps a team productive
• Provide better security
• Saves time and helps in getting the product to market faster.

To create a different environment you can find the blog here.

Advantages

• Quicker release
• Increased Transparency and visibility
• Reduce cost
• Improve developer productivity
• Improve communication
• Automatic deployment
• Working code guarantee on git
• One time setup for build generation and deployment
• Regular commit of code

Conclusion

CI/CD is actually a one-time setup and an automation process that helps to test, create a bug-free application, and deploy it to the team, a client without investing so much time in the development.