Python for DevOps

Chapter 6. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

Author: Noah

The practices of continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) are essential to a modern software development life cycle process. A CI system clones the codebase for the software under consideration from a source control system such as GitHub, builds the software into an artifact that can be a binary, a tar archive, or a Docker image, and, very importantly, also runs unit and/or integration tests for the software. A CD system deploys the artifacts built by the CI system to a target environment. This deployment can be automated for nonproduction environments, but usually includes a manual approval step for production. A more advanced type of such systems is a continuous delivery platform, which automates the deployment step to production and is capable of rolling back the deployment based on metrics obtained from monitoring and logging platforms.

Real-World Case Study: Converting a Poorly Maintained WordPress Site to Hugo

A while back, a friend asked for a favor fixing their company website. The company sold very expensive, used scientific equipment and its inventory was served via a WordPress site that was frequently hacked, performed horribly, or was down for days. Typically I try to avoid getting sucked into projects like this, but since it was a friend, I decided to help. You can reference the code for the conversion project at this Git repository.

Each step of the conversion process is covered ...