There are a ton of CI/CD tools out there, but which are the best for your open source project? And what are the differences between these tools? In this blog post, I’ll break down ten of the most popular CI/CD tools and dive into their features.
Whether you’re just starting to learn about CI/CD or looking to improve your existing pipeline, this article will help you find the right tool for the job.
What is CI/CD?
Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) are practices that enable developers to integrate code into a shared repository frequently. Each change is then verified by an automated build, allowing teams to detect problems early.
In this post, I want to focus on the benefits of CI/CD for open source projects, what our team learned from building Codespaces, and how you can get started today.
Benefits of CI/CD for open source
Open source projects have historically been held back by two big challenges: maintaining quality in the face of rapid growth, and making it easy for newcomers to contribute code.
CI/CD enables projects to do more with fewer maintainers by automating tests and checks for common problems. This lets maintainers spend more time reviewing larger pull requests or those that require a human touch.
CI/CD also helps onboard new contributors by providing immediate feedback on the quality of their contributions. This means less time spent waiting for review or debugging failed builds, and more time writing code.
By automating these processes, we can make open source projects stronger and help them grow at a faster pace than ever before—while still maintaining high quality standards.
GitHub Codespaces (formerly Visual Studio Codespaces) is a cloud-powered development environment that lives in the GitHub user interface. It comes with a full code editor and supports multiple programming languages, so you can stay in one place to write code, build applications, and collaborate.
You can create a codespace from any branch or pull request. Once you’re in your codespace, you can open any folder in your repository and get to work.
Codespaces integrates with your favorite tools and works with many common extensions without any setup needed. You can also easily connect to your own remote development environments. When you’re finished working, simply close your codespace and it will shut down automatically when all sessions are inactive.
As a maintainer of multiple open source projects, I’m always looking for ways to improve our processes and make it easier to work on the project. One thing that has made a big impact is using GitHub Codespaces as our development environment.
GitHub Codespaces provides a consistent, ready-to-code development container in GitHub. It allows us to share a common development environment with the rest of our team without having to spend lots of time configuring it. This means we can get straight to coding and avoid wasting valuable time configuring and maintaining our dev environment.
With Codespaces, there’s no need for multiple versions of various components on each developer’s machine. It enables us to work from anywhere, on any device, and with any operating system. Just as important is that the same exact image that we use for development is also used for CI/CD via GitHub Actions, making things much easier to keep in sync between different environments and removing many headaches caused by inconsistencies between them.
GitHub Codespaces: VS Code in the Cloud
GitHub Codespaces: VS Code in the Cloud
Codespaces is a new tool from GitHub that will allow you to use Visual Studio Code from within your browser.
If you’re already using VS Code, then this is a great way to access it from any device and not having to set it up again. For example, if you’re working on a project with your team, but you want to continue working on it remotely or perhaps on a different machine; This would be perfect!
This tool was just announced recently and is currently in beta. However, if you like to get early access to this tool, you can sign up for the beta here.
GitHub Codespaces is a new feature from GitHub which lets you code directly from your browser. This feature has been available for a long time and was called “Gitpod” but GitHub acquired it and made it an official product.
This is how one of the GitHub Codespaces looks like. It is all in the browser so there’s no need to install anything on your local machine. If you ever used Gitpod or Visual Studio Online, this is pretty much similar to those products.
GitHub Codespaces lets you run code directly from your browser in a fully-featured development environment. You can use this to build and test your apps, review and merge pull requests, and collaborate with others on GitHub. There are several advantages of using this feature:
No need to setup anything locally – Just click the codespace button on any repository and immediately jump into coding. This can be useful when you want to work on a project as soon as possible without wasting time setting up things locally or installing dependencies.
No need to worry about keeping your local development environment up-to-date – You can use these codespaces to test projects without worrying about installing dependencies or keeping your environment up-to-date with the latest versions of dependencies. This can be
