Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment
CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) is a set of practices that automate the process of testing and deploying code changes. Continuous Integration involves automatically building and testing code whenever changes are pushed to a version control system. Continuous Deployment extends this by automatically deploying code that passes tests to production environments. CI/CD pipelines typically include steps like: code checkout, dependency installation, testing (unit tests, integration tests), building, and deployment. Popular CI/CD platforms include GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, Jenkins, and CircleCI. CI/CD helps catch bugs early, ensures code quality, reduces manual deployment errors, and enables faster delivery of features. For Python applications, CI/CD pipelines often include steps for running tests with pytest, checking code quality with linters, building Docker images, and deploying to various environments. Understanding CI/CD is essential for modern software development practices.