Introduction to Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.
CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (or Continuous Delivery). It's a set of practices and an automated workflow that helps development teams deliver code changes more frequently and reliably. Continuous Integration (CI) is the practice of developers merging their code changes into a central repository frequently. Each merge triggers an automated build and test sequence. If the tests fail, the build is considered broken, and the team is alerted immediately. This allows bugs to be found and fixed quickly, preventing them from being integrated into the main codebase. Continuous Deployment (CD) is the next step. Once the CI phase (build and test) is successful, the CD process automatically deploys the code changes to a production environment. This automates the release process, making it faster and less error-prone. Platforms like GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and GitLab CI are popular tools for implementing CI/CD pipelines. A typical pipeline for a JavaScript project might look like this: 1. A developer pushes code to a repository. 2. The CI server automatically runs `npm install`. 3. It then runs the linter (`npm run lint`). 4. It then runs the tests (`npm test`). 5. If all pass, it creates a production build (`npm run build`). 6. Finally, the CD step deploys the built files to a hosting service.